


The Other Kingdom

by RainbowSprinkleDonuts



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F, Rachel and Kurt are minor characters, one year in the future, slight religious undertones on Quinn's part
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2015-01-08
Packaged: 2018-02-13 18:28:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2160648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainbowSprinkleDonuts/pseuds/RainbowSprinkleDonuts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts with friends with benefits, no more no less. All it takes is one year in New York City to complicate these sorts of arrangements, and a love this steeped in history was never simple to begin with. Quinntana</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Diane Young

**Author's Note:**

> First of many little changes to canon: Quinn goes to NYU, not Yale.

**January 2015**

The music and the thrumming of a city refusing sleep radiated from the very pavement Quinn teetered on as she stumbled across the disjointed sidewalk squares of Williamsburg, in the ever gentrifying Brooklyn. The ground was littered with plastic cups and noisemakers and all other manner of glittery paraphernalia that swam before Quinn's intoxicated vision in a delightful kaleidoscope of shapes and colors. The cacophony of inebriated exclamations pierced the unforgiving winter air, proclaiming the fresh hours of a new year. To be honest, she couldn't quite discern whether it was from the few stragglers cavorting through the early morning streets or if it was merely the echo from their evening still ringing in her ears.

"Pick up the pace, Quinn, I'm freezing my tits off here."

It was then she realized that her exposed, and very cold, hands were wrapped around something, or someone rather. She dropped her head onto the accompanying shoulder and laughed for no apparent reason.

"Santaaaaanaaaaaa," she whined, followed by a thick chuckle on her escort's part. The arm around her waist tightened, and she was being guided up something, a curb maybe.

"Come on, Fabray, I know you're not  _that_  drunk," Santana said, veering them both sharply left down a side street, that signaled familiarity bells in Quinn's head. Long gone were the muffled chants from behind the steamed up windows of dive bars as the street stretched quiet and docile before them. The street lights bathed the tar in burnt citrus light, illuminating the sides of trash bins and the occasional mouse.

Quinn pulled herself up to full height using the body next to her, and sighed, knowing she was able to at least retain her basic motor functions and put one high-heeled foot in front of the other.

"Home sweet hooome!" chimed Santana. She left Quinn standing on her own, so she replaced Santana with the brick wall of the enclave encompassing their door while Santana fumbled with the keys.

"HAPPY FUCKING NEW YEAR!"

Someone looking vaguely her age with a fleece and a backwards hat was careening towards her with his hand held above his head. Quinn limply held up her hand, which was high-fived with such force by the passing man that it nearly knocked her over into a fit of more giggles. Thank god Santana was there to brace her.

"Easy does it with the socializing, Q," Santana teased, as she coaxed Quinn through the now open door.

After laughing and stumbling and Santana all but carrying a petulant Quinn up the last flight of stairs, they finally tumbled into the apartment. Their booze soaked laughter echoed in the spacious main room, as did the door when Quinn shut it behind her mainly using her dead body weight.

Through the inky darkness Quinn could make out the creases of Santana's smile only inches from her face as she pressed her against the door. She knew that look. Her body already warm from the alcohol running through her blood, her veins began to hum. The heel of her hand slipped on the door handle as she tried to steady herself.

"Hi," Santana purred.

"Hi," Quinn mumbled before curling her hands around the nape of her companion's neck and planting one on her without warning. She could feel Santana shift to support Quinn literally hanging off of her neck, and before she knew it, her dress was hiked up and her legs were hooked onto hips.

It was a mess of misguided teeth and tongue and nails, gripping at and digging into everything. Quinn felt the vibration of a moan caught in Santana's mouth as it was latched onto her now bare shoulder as Quinn rolled her hips forward, arching off the cool metal door. Her hands were useless in Santana's hair somewhere when she felt lips on her ear.

"My room," they breathed, barely audible above Quinn's own shortness of breath. Quinn mentally thanked the Broadway world for being so financially generous to Rachel so they could move into a bigger apartment with 3 proper bedrooms. It certainly came in handy, for activities like this.

Perhaps a little overeager, Quinn let go of Santana completely and almost fell right to the floor on her jelly legs. Yeah, about those supposed motor skills. She was barely caught with a round of laughter from both of them as Santana jokingly dragged Quinn to the bedroom with most of her flimsy jacket trailing behind her.

"Suuuper sexy, Quinn," she mocked, pushing Quinn backwards so the backs of her knees were knocking against the edge of Santana's bed frame. She pressed their bodies together by the power of her palm on the small of Quinn's back. Quinn couldn't help but lean into it, Santana's hold on her was downright dizzying. Her fingers played with the straps of Santana's dress, reveling in the fabric passing between her fingers as she slid them up and down.

"No? Didn't do it for you?" Quinn baited, cocking her head to the side, or at least she attempted to. It probably looked more like it lolled to the side with her undone hair flopping this way and that. Santana's thin lipped smile gave her that impression at least. So, Quinn resorted to the only way she knew to get control back; she reached back, and tugged her zipper down. The sound alone made Santana's eyes darken and her hands bunch at the lamé fabric on Quinn's hips.

"How about this?" Quinn asked, her voice thick and her jaw slack. She didn't dare break eye contact as her dress pooled at her waist with the flick of the last shoulder strap, and Santana lunged forward, simultaneously searing her lips with a hungry open mouth kiss and shoving the rest of the dress down to the hardwood floor.

Quinn's vision was a blur again, this time with the flash of Santana's (predictably) scarlet dress flying over her head and the laughable attempts at undergarment removal with tequila fingers. Eventually, the snickering gave way to less audible murmurs and noises that, much to Kurt and Rachel's relief, tend to disappear into the crook of Santana's neck.

**...**

Santana let the hand holding her phone fall onto the bedsheets listlessly, followed by a frustrated sigh. She eyed Quinn's haphazard sleeping form with envy. Her pale skin reacted well to the glow of the dawn poking through the cracks in her curtain, and it let her make out the angles of Quinn's knees and arms bent in all directions. Her blond hair a voluminous encasement around the head that was facedown in the pillow. The first few times she'd seen Quinn sleep like that Santana had to lift her head up to make sure she was breathing. She was sure she'd read somewhere that the worst possible way to sleep was on your stomach.

Yet here Quinn was, sprawled out on two thirds of the bed and dead to the world like a blown out fuse, without a care. Santana, on the other hand, was wide awake, searching for sleep desperately in the shadows on her ceiling. She'd sobered up considerably, and was now slowly encroaching on the waking hours much to her annoyance.

It was kind of something, though, watching the first signs of daylight on the first day of what would be the 21st year of her life. She leaned over the gap between her bed and her only window to pull back the curtain just a little. The hodgepodge of buildings that comprised Brooklyn was surprisingly lovely at this hour, what with the sunlight slowly crawling across those stubborn remaining rooftop snow lumps and steam rising from those odd pipes you alway see sticking out with little tin hats. The whole scene imbued Santana with some diluted sense of existentialism, and although it was completely foreign, it wasn't unwelcome. The dusting of lavender creeping across the sky was soothing and was entirely hers at this ungodly hour.

She bent her wrist slowly in either direction to stretch out the strain from her and Quinn's aerobic activities a few hours prior. A satisfied smirk slid across her lips. She had a talent, that no one could deny. A spent Quinn Fabray, once the Chastity Queen of the Christian Society, currently sedated by her sex overload was evidence enough to persuade any nonbelievers. It was unfair how her talents were spent on one outlet, although Quinn was quite appreciative every time. Still, Santana was hardly unattractive in any way, and could be handed the best that queer NYC had to offer on a silver platter if she snapped her fingers. Yet she waded in the past in the form of her former cheerleading co-tyrant. What could she say, wallowing in the taste of victory hadn't gotten old since the first go around with the ice queen and hey, if it ain't broke

She felt her features soften; the beginnings of sleep settling in. Whatever she was doing, this reflective crap, it tired her mind. So she nestled back into the mound of pillows she'd somehow accrued through Kurt's constant redecorating of his room. Her gaze settled back on Quinn absentmindedly. What is it that people do on New Years?

Resolutions, she supposed. But Santana was impossible with promised habits of change. In high school, she made it a point, even, that she was unapologetically refusing to evolve. Santana Lopez was Santana Lopez and there were no areas for improvement. She hadn't changed much since then, true to form. She's been considered not quite tame, but rather disinterested in the freaks of New York. They were all so confident here and full of camaraderie and rising above and all that bullshit. Turned Santana off faster than morning wood.

She shook the sheet up around her from it's bunched heap at her feet, and by consequence, covered Quinn as well. Shame, she lamented, the view was nice.

Sleep was coaxing her into oblivion now. Her head sunk into the down, her neck giving way to the weight of it and letting it fall to the side. As her cheek hit the cotton, she was at a close enough distance to notice a little bundle of blonde strands that were trumpeting up slightly, and then floating back down atop Quinn's obscured face. A sign that Quinn is still among the living, and that was the final layer of peace that wooed Santana into sleep.

As her eyes drooped shut, a thought flitted across her mind; people also say that how you spend your New Year's is how you spend the rest of your year. Santana weighed the idea. She took inventory of the nights events, of her body deliciously sore, and her blonde bedfellow equally as satisfied.

Spend the next 12 months having mind-blowing sex with Quinn Fabray?

Could be worse.

**...**

The wafting of hot breakfast seduced Santana from her coma of exhaustion long after daylight had permeated her room at every angle. The banging of her heating pipe did the rest, although less gently than the pancakes. With a sigh and a stretch, she dragged her hand down her face and looked over at Quinn. Still asleep. Her mouth curled into a jealous snarl of disbelief at Quinn's luck in her infinite slumbers.

"Q," she mumbled into the pillow.

No response.

"Quinn, get up."

Radio silence. She did get a little snore out of her. Santana chuckled.

She swung her legs out from under the covers and went about gathering something to wear. Through her raucous movements, she would look periodically to see if Quinn stirred, but to no avail. Finally, once she was dressed she tossed a pillow at Quinn's head. That elicited a groan.

"Come on, Q, there's food out there," she coaxed. She only got another groan. "I'll make you your emergency coffee; black with a few scoops of crack and a B12 syringe on the side?" Nothing this time. So, Santana ditched the heap of bedsheets and pale limbs for her growling stomach.

The kitchen was laid out like they were having a three course meal. The mismatched plates were stacked in the center of the apartment's long wooden table that divided the living space and kitchen, flanked by piles of silverware, a pitcher each of orange juice and water, and a cluster of glasses hidden behind. It was abuzz with the sizzling of grease and the thwacking of Rachel cutting fruit and enthusiastic humming, because god forbid there not be music in some form around.

Kurt was a sight to behold at the stove, the source of the humming, with his back to Santana, as Rachel fluttered around him filling the air with her sing-song voice. His hair stuck out in all directions, there seemed to be a crushed flower behind his ear, and his pajamas were so askew that his left sleeve drooped over his hand so it looked like he had a prosthetic spatula for an arm.

Rachel's face lit up with that broadway smile as Santana plodded across the room, bleary eyed.

"Oh, morning Santana! Do you want any coffee? I made some. And I'm making fruit salad and also…"

Santana held her hand up to halt the words spilling from Rachel's mouth.

"Lets take the volume to a 5, shall we Berry? Also direct me to this coffee you speak of," she said, her flat voice subduing Rachel, who smiled warmly as she brought Santana to the coffee pot.

"Will that be two or three pancakes for the karaoke queen?" piped Kurt. Santana threw herself into one of the chairs on the other side of the table, the wobbly one, which took her by surprise.

"Look, I told you not to get me started because I can't be stopped. I'm like a Kardashian; the attention only makes my ego bigger. As well as my ass," Santana replied, sipping gingerly on her coffee.

"That's for fucks sure," Kurt cried, whipping his spatula arm around and getting flecks of batter on the refrigerator. Santana snorted into her coffee.

"Hey Little Edie, are you still drunk?" Santana asked.

Kurt spun around on his heel, and picked up his coffee cup which sloshed a bit, much to Rachel's visible chagrin.

"Snake that bit ya, know what I'm sayyyying?" he slurred. Santana merely held up her mug to him in solidarity, and he winked at her, before withering slightly under Rachel's glare and returning to his pancake duty.

Santana smirked to herself, and added, "I'll take a two stack, Lady Hummel."

"Same here and make it snappy."

Mercedes joined Santana at the table in a huff of exhaustion, to whom Kurt delivered an obedient yet wobbly salut. A bewildered expression struck Mercedes face, as she turned to Santana who merely shrugged.

"Look who slummed it last night in divvy Brooklyn, Miss Popstar," remarked Santana, turning towards her table companion.

"Yeah, you know, got to stay connected to the people," Mercedes replied, followed by a hearty laugh breaking the ruse. "Girl, why you got two coffee cups? Is your hangover that bad?"

Santana opened her mouth to respond, her eyes drifting to her now open door and a very grumpy Quinn making her way towards them. Santana lifted the second coffee mug into her outstretched hand and smiled amusedly up at her. The chair creaked under the sudden weight of Quinn, who was curling herself around her mug as if it were her life force. If she was capable of coherent speech, she would probably argue that it was.

"Morning Quinn," Santana said warmly, with a little playful sarcasm sprinkled on top.

"Mmmm," Quinn grunted in response, and took gulps of her tepid coffee.

"You're always so chipper in the morning," Santana commented, before doing the same.

Quinn shot her a good natured scowl, and scanned the table, before asking, "Where is the food, you said there'd be food?"

"Coming right up! What can I get ya, Susie Q?" Kurt called from behind her.

Quinn turned and nearly choked on her coffee at Kurt's sartorial deconstruction.

"Uh, three please," she managed to get out through her coughing and incredulous grin.

"Threeee it is!" Kurt shouted. He twirled his spatula above his head and moved his hips to match. He unfortunately knocked into Rachel who was already exasperated.

"Kurt! I swear to God, I have a knife in my hand!" she chided, wielding said weapon in his face.

Quinn turned back to Santana and asked, "Is he still drunk?" Santana eyes fell shut in exasperation, her head shaking side to side. She greeted Mercedes and the table sipped quietly on their beverages. A serenity overcame Quinn amidst the company of her friends. She fingered her little gold cross around her neck, a habit unintentionally employed to fill the pauses in her life with meaning, or so Santana had always said.

"I swear, living with them, it's like baby's first day out the womb. Every day," Santana groaned. "But hey, they aren't to blame. Not everyone had the same street savvy upbringing I did on  _las calles malas_."

Quinn chortled into her coffee. "Is that so?" she mocked. Santana shrugged smugly, and smiled at Quinn like it was some grand inside joke they shared.

Mercedes, having seen the entire exchange, looked between the two of them, and was about to give her two cents, when Kurt made some sort of indiscernible noise resembling a foghorn, and announced that the pancakes were ready. Santana leaped up with a plate in hand to get first dibs. Rachel made some fuss about syrup and Mercedes took advantage of their solitude at the table.

"Quinn," she murmured, "Santana's room? What the hell is that?"

Quinn laughed uncharacteristically, shaking the hair out of her face, and scoffed, "Nothing serious, I assure you. And I was as surprised as you are when it first started."

"Well last I checked, you both left the bar because your feet hurt, which was a shitty lie. So, I'm gonna need a better explanation than that," Mercedes pressed, crossing her arms on the table and giving her a raised brow.

Quinn shrugged, "I don't think there is one, we just mess around. You know I don't have the time for anything, and Santana doesn't have the emotional range, so we, you know..." Quinn paused, to lap at her drink. "...fill the gap." She popped her 'p' for effect.

Mercedes screwed her face up at the overshare, and Quinn laughed at her reaction. Clearly regretting pushing the matter, Mercedes left table in pursuit of pancakes. Quinn felt silk covered arms descend around her and a plate of hot pancakes with a pat of butter on top appeared before her.

"Aww, thanks Kurt," she cooed, looking up to see him attempt a wink quite tragically. She was joined shortly afterwards by everyone else, plates stacked full of fluff and syrup. A plate of bacon appeared and the bowl of Rachel's fruit followed, covering the table with aromas that made Quinn's eyes want to roll into the back of her head. The clank of cups being distributed and the slosh of orange juice being poured mingled with the harmonious din of everyone's voices layered over one another as the meal began.

Kurt proposed a toast, with his arm steadied by Rachel who eyed her roommate with reluctant affection. He babbled about how great everyone is doing, about preserving the Glee club to some degree, to which Santana frowned in distaste at why they always had to include that crap, and finally, to the new year.

"To the new year!" the group repeated. They clinked their glasses to the prospect and as Santana's glass met Quinn's, her eyes dropped to the t-shirt Quinn was wearing that she had mindlessly grabbed from Santana's dresser. Regarding that fact, Santana pursed her lips and winked over the line of cups, which ignited a warm flush up Quinn's neck and across her cheeks. Quinn smiled down at her plate, annoyed that a flirtatious wink from her nympho best friend had that effect on her. She was grateful that everyone was more hungry than attentive at the moment as they ripped into their food.

You know what? Fuck it. To the new year, because, honestly, why not?


	2. Worship You

**February 2015**

A rhythmic squeal erupted from the joints of Santana's wrought iron bed as Quinn's fingers curled around the bars like ivy around a garden post, bringing the head board's movement into sync with the rolling arch of her exposed body. Soft groans flew from her throat to join the squeaks, her head pressing deep into the pillow with her eyes clenched shut. The familiar mounting of something beneath her stomach triggers the canting of her hips to speed up, to meet this impending force with all the energy she can mus…

It hits her, a blinding break in her consciousness, and steals a gasp on it's way out. A pair of hands hold her hips down from what must have been an unpleasant sudden movement for the head between her legs. Her brain stalled, ridden with static, as her muscles tensed and a voice reverberated around the room that she wasn't capable of registering as her own.

Eventually, her breathing slowed, her senses gradually picked up on their surroundings and her eyes flew open, contracting in the morning light. A creeping of kisses was moving up her stomach, and Quinn looked down to meet Santana's insatiable expression from between her thighs. Her mouth cracked a grin.

A gust of air expelled from her recovering lungs, and Quinn uttered, "Unf, I mean, fuck me, San." Santana wrapped her hands around Quinn's thighs and squeezed them before wiping her mouth and crawling up beside her. It was the languorous crawl of a girl who knew her worth, and Quinn relished it. The visual stood as a reminder of what she had at her fingertips, a girl as inexhaustible as Santana Lopez who had put an end to Quinn's voyeurism by pulling the displaced sheet around her.

"Well, that's what we should be doing but you won't let me kiss you in the morning until you brush your teeth," Santana grumbled. She rolled on her side, and propped her head up on her elbow, the sheet drooping to reveal just enough to snag Quinn's eye. It's true, it was one of Quinn's rules. To be fair, as far as these sort of arrangements go, there weren't many rules to begin with, so to Quinn it was a fair request. Everything else was fair game. The couch. The table. The wall of the shower.

Quinn sidled up to her and looked her squarely in the eye, and purred, "You don't need to kiss me to fuck me." She put on her best smug facade, but she did flick her eyes down to Santana's lips, parted and very tempting.

Santana scoffed, and her hand grasped Quinn's shoulder firmly.

"Now, Quinnie," she said sternly, "don't cheapen yourself like that. You're worth more than a half-assed roll in the sack. You're worth a full fledged fucking, complete with lip service and a few solid minutes of groping." Santana shook Quinn's shoulder as she spoke, her smile breaking through.

Quinn grasped Santana's hand and brought it back down onto the bed.

"Thanks for the confidence boost," she replied, the laughter not yet gone from her voice. Santana nodded curtly.

"Oh any time. Now," she said with a clap. "I think it's time we ventured out into the world to see if it's gone to shit without us."

Quinn pulled the covers up over her head as she fell back into the pillows, her objection muffled. Santana grabbed her bra that hung precariously off the bedpost and slung it around her shoulders before clasping it in one fell swoop.

"We've spent the past week in either your bed or mine, every night, fucking like rabbits," Santana reasoned, slipping on a pair of jeans.

"And?" 13 year old Quinn tended to make an appearance when she was denied what she wanted. Santana sat down on the bed, still with no shirt, and peeled the duvet back from Quinn's pouting face.

"Aaaand, you have a day without classes or some midterm, or whatever, for the first time in forever, don't waste it, Q," Santana scolded. She stared her down until Quinn rolled her eyes and sighed.

"Fine! You're right, you're right," she relented. "Throw me something."

Santana turned in her seat on the edge of the mattress and bent down to rifle through a pile of sweaters she that she was certain were half Quinn's. Upon finding a recognizable bulky hunter green one, she sat up, and felt her bare back collide with warm skin. Her body tensed at the sudden contact, and arms snaked around her middle to pull her back slightly into Quinn's embrace.

"I'll go out today," Quinn whispered in her ear, husky and brushing her lips against a reddening lobe ever so slightly. "If you promise to continue where we left off when we get back." A fuzzy haze settled over Santana's thoughts to the effect of Quinn dragging the pliable cartilage of her ear in between her teeth. The same haze that sent Santana's hands wandering when Quinn woke her up in the middle of the night on Tuesday and started walking her fingers up Santana's thigh under the covers. Also the very fog that compelled Santana to bend Quinn over the back of the couch Friday afternoon and rip her tights open with her new manicure, when Berry and Hummel were out shopping. Quinn kept dropping her scarf around the apartment, and bending over painfully slowly to pick it up.

Santana may have the technique to make a woman come undone, but Quinn could seduce a nun to murder if the desire ever struck her.

They piled on all of the winter accessories they could find, Santana borrowing Rachel's glove/mitten contraptions despite grousing about the unfortunate pink and orange color combination on the entire walk to the L train. The glory of a weekday excursion was not lost on them, especially on a frigid day such as this, which reduced the masses of aimless tourists to a manageable level. There were seats in abundance on the subway, sidewalk traffic flowed with remarkable efficiency, not to mention the surreal nature of it all, like each hour was on loan from some parallel universe. It was as though they were reclaiming the city and were finally able to enjoy it's spoils free of invaders. Ask any New Yorker who has ever had a weekday off. They'll vehemently agree.

The girls traversed the labyrinth of Union Square station to hop onto a well timed Q train that shot up to the southeastern corner of Central Park. Santana wanted to cartwheel down the train car. There was certainly room.

Ice skating at Wollman rink was the chosen activity of the day, also in the spirit of a reduced tourist population. It was a fine day for it. Quinn marveled silently at the veins of the dormant trees cracked across the pale blue sky, swaying in the light breeze. Clouds migrated lazily amongst the buildings, traveling in dense tufts as even they weren't immune to the chill. The two leaned leisurely against the waist high walls while the zamboni made it's sweeping circles around the rink, before following the gaggle of eager skaters out onto the fresh ice.

The sun hopped from cloud to cloud at the high point of the midafternoon, illuminating the puffs of hot air being propelled from Santana's mouth as she shouted after her elusive best friend. Quinn's childhood of excessive ice skating parties showed when she was doing laps around Santana, who hugged the sides. As she glided across the glistening surface, the crisp air flying by her cheeks and the weightless momentum carrying her around the curves, she could barely contain her glee at seeing her former co-captain so terrified. The parades of little kids excusing themselves in all languages to pass Santana only accentuated it. Even Santana had to laugh in spite of herself at Quinn very obviously enjoying every second of her humiliation.

"There are  _knives_  on my  _feet!_ " she exclaimed when Quinn attempted to pry her from the plastic wall. She was contributing wonderfully to the smattering of nicks along the bottom from the thousands of other uncoordinated skaters. Santana's countenance of stricken determination made it terribly difficult to get any words of soothing guidance out as Quinn fell to pieces at the sight of it. Eventually, Quinn was able to lure her out onto the open ice. She white knuckled Quinn's hand the whole time, but they made it around the rink quite a few laps within the hour. She kept mumbling and grumbling how her "people" were about sand not snow, and that she was not genetically inclined for this sort of death defying thing.

Eventually, as she does, Santana overestimated her learning curve and insisted she be released to make it on her own. There was never anything anyone could do at that point. Just watch and get ready to clean up the mess.

It ended just as Quinn feared; the clicking of Santana's blades clipping and the arms pinwheeling before she hit the ice with a resounding grunt of frustration. Quinn hockey stopped beside Santana's head and didn't bother to suppress her tongue-in-teeth grin looking down at her fallen friend. Her hair was fanned out around her head and her limbs had all succumbed to their defeat. Quinn would have this up on Instagram in a second if her phone was readily available.

"Get me. Off. This fucking. Glacier." The words sliced through her gritted teeth. Santana maintained a vicegrip on Quinn's arm, out of fear or revenge, some combination of the two, as they coasted to the edge and found a bench to retire to. Their appendages were all chilled to the bone and the tiny gold cross around Quinn's neck was nearly frosted over.

"You were doing so well— " Quinn lauded, as they approached 59th street to head down 6th Avenue.

"Oh, please. You enjoyed every second of that. We will never speak of it again, Fabray," Santana curtly spat. She pushed her aviators further up her nose, and tugged down her hat. The white walk sign appeared across the way, and Quinn dragged her pouting friend forward, before the wall of stagnant cars and trucks, expelling clouds of exhaust behind them. Maybe she did enjoy watching Santana meet her match. Quinn could be sadistic. There were probably a handful of miscreants picking sticky slush from their hair still who would vouch for that. Those instances with Santana, however, were so far and few, she had to soak them in when she was lucky enough to witness them.

It was only a few blocks before the pair sought refuge through a revolving door and into the lounge of Le Parker Meridien, where the gust of insulated air left their frostbitten cheeks pleasantly tingling. The corridor stretched out grandly before them with plush seating lining the walls, and the skyward reach of the ceilings accentuated by the mirrors running up them, cut smartly in the shapes of wood paneling. They seated themselves quite easily in one of the sinking couches, and piled their hats and gloves and other woolen items beside them to huddle in the center. Thier knees knocked together while they held a menu between them to choose from.

A snooty waiter took their order, and they relaxed into their hideaway. Warm air toasted the feeling back into their legs, emanating from an unseen source beneath the couch. Cascading down the walls, opulent scarlet drapes, secured with oversized gold tassels, seemed to cocoon the room. A veritable oasis in the arctic tundra beleaguering the city this year. They picked out a few patrons to slander, Santana fabricating the most outlandish possibilities, and Quinn surprising her best friend with her crass in between her bouts of muffled laughter.

Eventually, the waiter brought Quinn her tea and Santana a hot chocolate that required tableside presentation. The one where they pour the milk over the chocolate and all that. Santana sat transfixed while the chocolate took to the milk like paint on canvas, saturating it with a rich mocha color, while Quinn dropped two sugar cubes into her cup. She had a feeling Santana would get a kick out of that. She supposed it was a fair tradeoff for the embarrassment she put Santana through. They both took long regretful slurps of their beverages, but they hardly minded the scalding liquid burning their tongues. Heat was heat at this point.

Quinn peered at Santana over her teacup as she happily gulped at her drink.

A darting of her tongue to swipe her chocolate lips and Santana asked, "Jesus, what now?"

"Hot chocolate. Really." Quinn took a dainty sip of disdain.

"Oh, don't sit there all smug, Fabray," Santana scoffed, without missing a beat.

Quinn laughed her way arrogantly into a breathy, "Yeah?"

"You think you're hot shit with your tea and your sugar cubes, all classy and whatnot. Hate to break it to you, but you look like an uptight bitch," Santana began. She received a patented Quinn Fabray eyeroll at that elaboration. Indisputable superiority denouncing the subject entirely all in one quick ocular arc. It was the ghost of the high school cheer captain floating to the surface, always imposing her skyward nose where it was unwanted. Lets not forget the tight smile, equally as halting. Santana hardly flinched, not unused to such special treatment.

"Maybe I'm not a sex-crazed nympho like you, not everyone is, you know," Quinn finally retorted, although her tone and pointed stare dragged her opinion with it, as the answer she'd already decided. Santana's hot chocolate seemed to cleanse her of her resentment towards Quinn's snide remarks. With each sip, her spine stretched itself out leisurely on the sofa, like a taut ball of yarn unwinding itself inch by inch.

"Q, first of all, nympho means sex-crazed so maybe lay off the big fancy words for a while, and second of all, I highly doubt that," Santana replied. She did a sweep of Quinn's pin straight body with her charcoal eyes. Might as well practice what she preaches.

Quinn, ever insistent on making her point, tried not to lose her momentum, "Whatever, so I'm uptight because I drink tea? That's absurd."

Santana took a long drag on her mug of steaming chocolate. She smacked her lips, exalting the quality of the beverage.

"Exactly," she confirmed, "Besides the fact that it makes you look as fuckable as an eighty year old wooden dildo found in grandma's attic, right now, my sweet chocolatey lips are primed and ready to make out with anyone in this room. If someone, by some miracle, found you attractive, the first thing they get to taste is your sour dead grass hippie breath. You would need a mint or six before anyone locked lips with you."

Quinn's drew another sip of the scalding liquid past her lips, her eyes narrowing in search of a rebuttal, but all she could scrape together was a haughty, "Is that so?"

"Well, you're more than welcome to put it to the test," Santana offered, suggestively leaning forward and gesturing vaguely to her lips in a Vannah White fashion. Leave it to Santana to jump on every opportunity to make out.

"Tempting, but I'll pass," she declined. Santana shrugged back into her blasé lounge position.

"Whatevs. I bet kissing you would be like kissing the old bag over there." She waved her thumb at an older woman, waspy no doubt, in her stately suit across the way. She poured her tea and scowled at their general existence. However, that only provoked Santana to blow her a kiss, to which the woman bristled and turned away in a huff of "how  _dare_  she!"

Santana beamed at her successful antagonizing. Quinn scolded her in good fun. The latter went to sip from her cup and found it curiously drained. Funny how time escapes her, consumed by the flames of her mirth, while in Santana's company.

The thought tumbled into the crevices of Quinn's mind, where all her fanciful notions are ushered, while she placed the silver strainer gingerly, and poured herself another cup.

**...**

"We wanted Oregon Pinot Noir, not the Italian!"

Santana spun on her heel, her hair whipping her in the face, and put on her best condescending smile.

"Oh, my apologies, guys!" she said, sickly saccharine enough to cause cavities, "I thought you were after a more sophisticated palate. Won't make that mistake again!"

The table took it just as she hoped they would, taken aback but too flustered to respond before she slipped through the crowded dining room and through the kitchen doors. Door, singular actually, due to the stereotypically cramped size of the restaurant. She slipped past the steel tables and between the cooks shuffling amongst each other not unlike a deck of cards. The wine room's slim glass door swung open with ease and she barely needed to push half her torso in to grab the bottle she sought.

It was so fucking ridiculous, and her exasperation showed plainly on her face. She hated these people, the downtown yuppies that stuffed this godforsaken place with their tweed blazers and their shirts unbuttoned halfway down. Girls, on daddies dime, draped with whatever bohemian dress shirt combination they just pulled off some rack at Scoop and voices that make nails on a chalkboard sound melodic. There were those guys getting martinis, which was the most laughable practice of them all, especially come summer when the place whips up watermelon ones. What a fucking joke. Sometimes it wasn't so bad when a pair of roommates just wanted to treat themselves to an overpriced plate of bolognese, and sometimes it was worse when their parents were in town.

Santana preferred to hang back here with the kitchen staff. In the steam and cacophony of pots thrown about, they shared her values, just like they shared the rejected open bottle of wine between them now, each taking greedy swigs as it reached their hand. They hardly spoke to her, and she to them, and those were Santana's favorite type of co workers. All of that might have been due to a language barrier but she was none the wiser for lack of ever trying to communicate.

Santana barely noticed a blonde ponytail poking itself through the door gap before she heard it.

"San, table 14 wants their check. Haul ass, mamasita," shouted Becca. Her full body slid into the florescent light and she perched a bony hand on her leopard hip. Santana straightened her own leopard dress, the ones all the waitresses donned. They actually had a rotation, each day of the week the manager picked a different dress. For Santana, being instructed to buy seven dresses at three quarters of the price upon hire was hardly a chore. The perverse fact that they were all skin tight and all stopped below her bountiful ass could be overlooked.

She followed Becca out onto the floor. The dense atmosphere of liquored conversation and collective body heat barraged her senses, almost creating a dreamy haze of the space that was made up of sectioned off alcoves of wobbly rustic tables. Handing off the bottle of Oregon and instructions to another server, Santana sauntered over to the moony-eyed young couple that occupied table 14. Check, please, and here's the card. Right. She knew that look, the one where they wanted the check settled  _urgently_  so they could scamper on off to most likely his place where they will go at it on a bed of rosepetals listening to Bruno Mars.

God, she hated this holiday.

The evening carried on for another two hours of polished off bottles of red, shared bruschettas, giggly hair flipping, a few ass grabs, albeit a surprisingly low number for the usual average, before she had shooed out all but her last two tables. The dining rooms were hushed and the candles flickered happily on the last of their wax. She was at the home stretch, and the final hour was always the most gratifying coast to freedom.

Becca and Santana held down the fort, both sitting at the bar sipping on some concoction the bartender mixed together. It hardly mattered what it was at this point. She was already 3 drinks to the… breeze or whatever the saying was.

She pushed herself off the plush stool to do a round, offer water refills, plates to be cleared, the like. Satisfied with her service, her patrons dismissed her and she had all but rounded the divider between the bar and the tables when she saw a blonde, not dressed in leopard, occupying her seat. An irrepressible grin tugged at her lips.

She strolled over and sat down next to the new customer, tilting her head to get her attention. Quinn spun in her seat and smiled at her, an unreadable one.

"What can I get you?" Santana purported, coming off as some sort of sultry drug dealer. Quinn barked a laugh at the affected voice Santana put on.

"Is that how you talk to all of the people that come in here? Now I know where you get your stupid generous tips," Quinn said, lifting the high ball glass that was once Santana's to her lips for a sip. Santana eyed her stolen drink, and decided to let her have it. She lounged against the bar, exuding a certain ownership of her sexuality that airbrushed magazine covers attempt to emulate.

"Hey, know your market. But seriously, what are you doing here. You never come to harass me at my job, you said it's a vapid trend sponge with cuisine on par with Carabba's," Santana stated. Quinn leaned back a few degrees with her drink sliding past her lips, and gazed up at the tin ceiling. The golden hues of the rich lighting in the dining rooms danced across the aluminum tiles. Santana watched them cast her features in a soft glow. She looked young, which was a strange thought. She  _was_  young but Santana couldn't recall the last time Quinn actually looked it. The blonde in question sighed into an absent minded shrug, before returning to Santana's eyeline.

"Well, nobody should be alone on Valentine's Day."

At that, Santana was without a retort, so she slipped her cocktail out of Quinn's hand and took a sip. She felt the inklings of a genuine blush on the back of her neck but suppressed it immediately. Sincerity was not a trait they often used upon one another. Amongst all of the discarded clothes and skin on skin, it was easy to forget they were friends at the root of it all. They told people they were anyway. High school was always fond of labels, but nobody ever outlined what it meant to be the names they branded each other with.

"By nobody you mean you," Santana quipped. Although, the bite was hardly there.

Quinn merely smiled knowingly, and grabbed her drink back.

"I'll have the bolognese," she announced.

"I'll see if the kitchen is still open."

Santana finished up her hour flitting from the two tables to the bar, twirling a forkful of Quinn's meal into her mouth each time she passed. A single straggler remained at table 7 as the witching hour rolled in, sipping his cognac introspectively. Santana had long lost interest in scaring him out, and was helping Quinn sop the sauce off her plate with some bread. Becca caved as she watched Santana chase the remaining bits of tomato around the dish, trying to knock Quinn's bread piece away so she could have it all to herself. She told Santana to take her fuck buddy home, that she would handle 7.

Santana braved the gale force winds pushing her backwards towards the Hudson as they trudged down 10th street, across the island to Quinn's apartment off 1st Avenue. She made use of Quinn as a body shield as best as she could, and Quinn let her because she knew it wouldn't make a difference either way. The city had succumbed completely to the February chill. It was everywhere; icing over steps, pipes, seeping through the cracks in the walls, snatching at every mug of coffee or cup of soup, nipping at every inch of exposed skin and riding on the back of every burst of wind. Nowhere was safe, the suns warmth was merely a myth of lore, buried in the past under a snowdrift.

The stuffy heat of the apartment was welcomed with sighs of relief and bags dropping unceremoniously on the floor. Santana darted for the bathroom, a quirk that never failed her whenever she entered someone's home. Quinn busied herself around the studio while she waited. She brought a few mugs from her little table next to her bed, a queen sized bed that engulfed most of the main area, into the little kitchen alcove in the corner. It was small, but it was all she needed, and it hers. She pulled a lighter from one of the few drawers in the kitchen and began darting about quietly.

When Santana emerged, releasing an over dramatic sigh, she had to adjust her eyes to the darkened apartment. Small flames scattered their sleepy gleam around the room, and she almost didn't notice Quinn who leaned over one on the windowsill as she set it alight. Santana took a few hesitant steps into the main room and paused as Quinn took note of her presence.

"Um, Quinn? Something you want to share with the class?" Santana inquired. Her gaze on the approaching blonde was uneasy and her hands spun the ring on her right hand around her finger.

Quinn set the lighter down on the white sill and assumed the usual position before Santana, tugging at the collar of her peacoat and looking up at her through hooded eyes.

"I want a real Valentine's Day. I've never had one," she stated just above her breath. "I bought roses for my kitchen." She nodded in the direction of the small vase of red flowers, just as she said. Santana's stomach tied itself into a most unpleasant knot of pity and remorse, as a good deal of her past relationships weren't helped by Santana's involvement in her life. That quickly gave way to a panic at what Quinn was now insinuating.

Quinn had been undoing the buttons of the coat as Santana stood stiff. She broke from her piercing stare into Quinn's clouded eyes to watch the navy wool slide off her own shoulders onto the floor with a muffled thump. Quinn grazed her fingertips down the polyester print, a golden blur in the dim light, and placed them at the hemline, conveniently below her ass.

"Quinn," she protested, as her best friend's lips assailed her neck. She felt her body react to the sensual contact but she felt strange, like she had been duped into something she certainly didn't sign up for.

"Relax," Quinn mumbled into her skin. When her words and affections could not ease the tension in her friend's muscles, she looked her squarely in the eye. "It's not like that, okay? It's just… I can't have a Valentine's Day by myself."

Santana scoffed, "So, why wrangle me into this? You can have any Tom, Dick, or Harry from Pace to Syracuse." Quinn's explanation, while a bit scalding, at least allowed her to resume the status quo. Nothing made Santana more at ease than knowing where she stood. With anyone.

It was then that Quinn's neutral facade melted into a smirk, her eyes alight with something terribly sinful.

"Because," she drawled, her vowels falling all over the place. "Tonight, I want someone who can do things to me so that the sounds coming out of my mouth are so loud, that they shatter that vase over there into a million pieces."

If ever there was an image to accompany the definition of lust in the dictionary, Santana's face at that utterance would be it. Her entire body was revved up like a Mustang, and Quinn the hot asphalt road gleaming in the afternoon sun before her. Quinn wasn't even touching her, and if she did, there wouldn't be another coherent word out of her little pink maddening mouth.

"And I know the only person who can guarantee that…"

The dramatic pause as Quinn's features came into focus, a hairs breadth of open air left between them, almost drew a whine from Santana's constricted throat.

"...is you."

Santana chuckled and said with finality and blown out pupils, "However you want it, Susie Q."

At the faintest contact of Quinn's somehow still glossed lips grazing her own, Santana released the brakes. She seized the moment, charged with Quinn's fantastical expectations, and floored it. Everything rushed past her in her effort to get Quinn naked and on her back on the bed. Fabric and various objects collided but here was nothing but ringing in her ears as Quinn's body became a symphony of sensations underneath her.

She groaned as their bare skin melded together and raked her nails down the sides of Quinn. There was no further discussion, no explanation. Just the weight of Santana's upper body atop Quinn's, undulating up against her like waves crashing against the shore, as tan fingers did their work. It's not like they would have done anything different tonight had it been an ordinary day. Although, Santana usually had quite a few qualms when it came to playing along with Quinn's jerry-rigged attempts at happiness. She didn't have time for her deluded bullshit, no matter how guilty she felt for their sham of a friendship in the past.

But this was the only way to have sex with Quinn at the moment, and sex was one thing, but  _great_  sex was hard to come by. How could she resist Quinn, so heated and willing, legs that parted themselves pretty much. If Quinn wanted to dress up their fornication with roses and a pretty pink bow for one night, Santana might as well just suck it up and give in this once.

She did have to admit, the candles were a nice touch.


	3. Unbelievers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My depth of legal knowledge consists solely of CSI and Law and Order: SVU so I apologize for anything stupid I wrote as far as the legal jargon.

**March 2015**

  **.....**

Nothing is more zealously received than the turning of the earth upon its axis as the northeast swings into spring. The first inklings of March, be it puddles trickling down along the gutter in the morning, in place of the frozen opaque masses they usually become overnight, or a layer of sweat forming under wool hats after power walking to the subway station. These symptoms of a warm future close at hand tempt the cities residents with visions of vermillion and lapis spilling from flowerbeds and the crisp mild bite of ramps woven between eggs at Sunday brunch, the desire to even go out for Sunday brunch, or go out at all.

However, such watercolor dreams never come to fruition. Instead, New York welcomes the equinox with a meteorological cocktail of sticky, varying humidity, drizzle, and fog as far as the eye can see. Any wisp of warmth is snuffed out by the 15 mph winds that barrel down the streets, carrying the last of winter’s chill with them, insistent that you don’t forget. It’s pretty bleak.

Quinn found herself in the middle of this with her hair flat and frizzed, and her calves coated in a layer of sweat underneath her cumbersome rain boots, beneath a paper white sky. She trudged through the indecisive mist thing happening that morning amidst the herds of suits up 6th Avenue, slipping a little on the marble sidewalks built out on each block.

Despite the tepid meteorological turnout, it was one of those day’s pregnant with something. A sense of approaching a vast beginning, almost, like her steps sprung from the pavement and at any second life! glorious, elusive life is going to unfold before her in a vibrant scene like a pop up book from her childhood. Her little gold cross bounced on her collarbone and everything felt fresh and alive, be it the budding trees on 12th street or the stations whipping by in the grungy windows of the outdated F train. Quinn couldn’t explain its reasoning, other than it being a case of waking up on the right side of the bed. Why fight it; it was certainly a perfect day for this outlook.

Today was different, today was alive, and she was alive amidst the sober faced business drones. Passing grandiose lobby after lobby at the feet of midtown’s towering monoliths and geometric space towers alike, she arrived at her destination. She hurried between two modern onyx fountains and into a glass enclosure where piano music echoed softly from a baby grand in the far corner.

A few breaths to collect herself and she swiped her card and shot up some 40 floors in a mirrored and carpeted elevator. First day jitters hit her, and she flattened her palm down her pencil skirt frantically before the doors opened onto the floor. She nodded at no one, and proceeded through the frosted glass doors beside the plaque “Leeman & Associates” to start her first day in the shark tank. Quinn Fabray: Law Intern.

She couldn’t deny the pride straightening her back and holding her head high as the clock struck 9. Look who ended up actually amounting to something in this stately office, all wood paneling and sweeping marble reception desk. Not too shabby.

Only after she kicked off her boots and fell back onto her bed did she release a breath she had been holding all day. The flurry of the day’s introductions and procedure run throughs and words and words and more words dissipated into a proud glow. Her body relaxed into the quiet as the sun sank, splaying amber hues across her window. Well, it relaxed for a minute before her buzzer jarringly announced a visitor.

She slunk over to the intercom and only had to press the button to hear Santana’s voice fill her apartment amidst the crackle.

“Quinn open up! I brought snacks!” she yelled. Quinn buzzed her up and listened through the paper thin walls as her visitor’s boots clunked up the steps. Quinn recalled the volume at which their after hours activities usually rose to and blushed profusely. No one has complained, but still, she could hear Santana’s boots nearing her door clear as a bell, so she only imagined the acoustics went both ways. Not the best way to bond with the neighbors.

Bursting through the door, Santana huffed and puffed while she divested herself of her coat. She brandished two white coffee cups with a frowning face stamped on the side of each.

“Grumpy’s for the lawyer, a little love from down home Brooklyn,” Santana said. She bounced onto Quinn’s bed beside her, and held out the cup as Quinn pulled herself into a sitting position.

She took a slow sip of the steaming beverage, and hummed “Mmm, thanks S. God, I needed it.” A paper bag landed in her lap, her curiosity imploring at how Santana pulled all this stuff out of nowhere.

“I got you that olive oil bread you like from that place too,” Santana explained. She opened it for her and took a hunk off, popping it into her mouth and grimacing instantly. “Yeah, still weird.”

Quinn laughed a deep, energy depleted laugh and took a piece off for herself, reveling in the sweet and savory sensation, that she washed down with a sip of her latte. The flavor combination surprised her when she tried the for the first time, and it’s tastiness continues to shock her every time.

“You’re the best, San,” Quinn told her in between sips that turned into gulps. Santana shrugged and licked some residual foam off her lips. It was certainly strange, this ease they had fallen into. This whole bringing her coffee on her first day of her internship thing, for example. Santana never brought anyone anything, except maybe Brittany because she would forget to eat if Santana didn’t put food in front of her.

She tried to shove the urge to catalog every gesture Santana made into the back of her mind. It wasn’t easy. Blame it on Quinn’s predisposed legal nature, but Quinn couldn’t help but assign motive or meaning to everything anyone ever did for her. Handshakes were met with a once over, and texts out of the blue scrutinized for traces of favors between the pixeled words. It was exhausting more than it was fruitful.

And what did it matter? Brittany was different than this. What those two had between them was different from this. Whatever this was.  

“So tell me Q!” Santana exclaimed, “How did it go? Did you get put on a serial killer case?” Santana’s legal naivety never failed to amuse her, and she almost affirmed her assumption just for kicks. If only to see her face light up at the scandal of it all.

They sat like school girls on Quinn’s bed as the evening carried on outside the four white walls, while she relayed the days events in her new environment. Santana was easily wowed by all the legal jargon and apparently that went a long way because after the lattes were drained and the loaf picked to crumbs, Santana had that glint in her eye. Quinn wouldn’t have pinned her as a girl who could be wooed by people in positions of power. Santana was often herself the one with the upper hand.

Nevertheless, as the sun dropped, so did Santana’s eyes, going from wide-eyed fascination to hooded lust. It was mesmerising to watch, and perhaps a bit of a power trip. She couldn’t stop herself from throwing random words into sentences, sure by now that Santana was no longer absorbing a single syllable beyond their phonetics. She was leaning forward so far that her face eclipsed Quinn’s entire line of vision. Quinn’s legs erupted in goosebumps at her proximity, as she had long since discarded her tights and her blazer.

“Say that again,” Santana demanded.

“Deposition.”

Santana’s lips parted, and she hooked her finger in Quinn’s collar to pull her forward.

“Something else.”

“Administrative dissolution.”

She quirked her brow and pulled them both backwards, settling herself upright against the headboard.

“Come here, your honor.”

She yanked Quinn into her lap by her hips, and Quinn made a squeak at her sudden force. Santana’s one hand toyed with the buttons on her blouse and popped them open one by one.

“Santana I’m law intern, not a judge.”

“Don’t ruin it, Q,” Santana mumbled against the smooth skin just below Quinn’s collarbone, that she now had fully exposed before her. She was pressing a slow succession of kisses, forging a path across the bridge of her bra and down as far as her bowed neck allowed her. Quinn threaded her hands in the dark tresses below her. Her eyes were in danger of drifting shut as she tugged on Santana’s halted scalp. Her lips had found a spot it liked on her ribcage, and they were currently bookmarking it with a lip shaped blotch for later.

“Okay, then,” Quinn acquiesced, rolling her eyes and ordering, “Lay back.” She pushed Santana’s shoulders until she was as vertical as she could be, propped up against against the pillows and all. Quinn shuffled her body to better suit her position, and dipped her head to bring them eye to eye. Her open blouse brushed against Santana’s arms, starchy white against her caramel skin.

Santana gave her that challenging look. The one with the narrowed eyes and smirk, lips parted ever so slightly. The one that fondly boasts of knowing Quinn inside and out. The one that always dared Quinn to prove her wrong. Quinn licked her lips, almost propitiously.

“It’s time for your cross examination,” she murmurred.

Santana’s eyes darkened, lapping up the seduction dripping from Quinn’s words. She let her shirt be nudged up and pulled from her skin and over her head. She let Quinn keep herself at an agonizing distance, mere centimeters from her mouth, eyes trained on the parting of Santana’s lips.

Quinn’s fingers drew nonsensical measurements across her stomach, not breaking her gaze.

“The defense will now approach the accused,” Quinn spoke, slowly, drawing out each word. She rose a few degrees, putting space between them. “Santana Lopez.”

Santana wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement, but either way, she was a bit preoccupied by ministrations of Quinn’s hands and their indiscernible paths. It wasn’t until they paused, an index finger in mid-swirl, that she realized Quinn was anticipating a response.

“Yes?” she uttered. Santana’s sandpaper voice betrayed her. God, Quinn was such a tease, was what she really meant. The hands resumed their purpose, slow and dragging skin across skin.

“Would you consider yourself completely in control of your body at all times, Ms. Lopez?” Quinn asked. Her voice was unwavering, as if she stood before the stand in her pencil skirt and her simple black pumps. Quinn’s hands found a place that pleased them and they settled momentarily along the curves of Santana’s ribs.

“Yes…” Santana hissed, for as she let the word slip out, Quinn dragged her nails down her sides. She palmed the dip of Santana’s waist as she smiled wickedly at her friend’s body’s objection to her answer. Santana swallowed thickly.

“Oh? So you deny that you crave human contact?”

Quinn dug the heels of her palms into Santana’s skin ever so slightly as they traversed her stomach, and ghosted over the cups of Santana’s black bra. Like a reflex, Santana pressed her shoulders into the pillows to arch into her outstretched hands. But Quinn maintained her distance and her smile shifted into a smirk, one of triumph, as felt the heat of Santana’s blood rushing beneath her skin and her hips twitching beneath where she sat astride them.

Santana narrowed her eyes at Quinn, who sat smug atop her, pupils dilated spectacularly, drunk on her power. A stream of air exiting Santana’s nose disturbed the askew strands of brown hair around her face, the only movement amidst the complete rigidity of Santana’s entire being. Although she was glaring, it couldn’t be denied that a faint glimmer somewhere in Santana’s iris betrayed her enjoyment of this game Quinn was fond of.

“I do deny it,” Santana spoke; her words solid, stacking like carefully laid stones. Quinn considered this response with a frown. Her fingers lowered themselves one by one to make contact with the padded black fabric encasing the skyward reaching mounds. Despite herself, Santana’s hips twitched again. Quinn raised her brow in disbelief.

Quinn made no effort to keep from rolling her hips as she lowered her torso to run parallel to Santana, who squared her jaw in a miserable attempt at confirming her response.

“I see,” Quinn mumbled, the paper thin distance allowing every other word to brush her lips across Santana’s. “You deny that you want me to touch you?”

She reached her thumbs above the bra fabric and ran them across the skin that she found there, smiling as she felt Santana breathe shakily against her mouth.

“I do,” she maintained. Although her eyes were wider now, her resolve melting by the second.

“You deny that you want me to kiss you?”

This she whispered, dragging each word across Santana’s lips in what could only be described as pure agony on Santana’s part. Her hands fisted the fitted sheet as she tried to suppress the urge to slam herself into Quinn, shut her up. But she would not forfeit.

Santana licked her lips, her tongue stealing a gasp from Quinn this time, as it darted out from her slowly slacking jaw.

With a smile of her own, Santana breathed, “I deny it.”

“Don’t lie under oath, Ms. Lopez,” Quinn scolded. Santana felt the kiss of death as hips began to rock slowly down upon her own. “You uphold to the court that you, Santana Lopez, don’t want me?”

“Nope,” Santana snapped. She tried a nonchalant grin, but it probably morphed into a grimace as the friction picked up it’s pace. Quinn pushed firmly, a little too firmly, against Santana’s chest and sat up. She took the edge of her shirt between the pads of her fingers and began to peel it off of herself. As she shed her prim clothes and proper posture, Santana was transfixed, as if she was four years old and watching the unwrapping of an ice cream bar in August.

“You dont… need me?”

Quinn’s mouth hung loose on it’s hinges, still upturned into a grin, and the cardio below her waist was getting the better of her lungs. If Santana was any other girl, she knew she would be on her knees with demure Quinn all popped open and hiked up and words loaded with subtext like a hot and bothered librarian.

“Fuck no,” Santana scoffed, but her nails gripped Quinn’s thighs and her lip, a bruised prisoner of her teeth, made a different case. Quinn halted her movements, Santana held her breath. The former propped herself up on the bed with one arm, and bent her body at a strange angle. Santana looked down to notice Quinn’s hand dancing dangerously close to the top of her jeans.

Before Santana could object, Quinn dextrously undid the button and slid her entire hand beneath the taut denim. Her eyes found Santana’s as she made contact with what she sought. Santana’s eyes nearly rolled into the back of her head, where Quinn gasped in faux-surprise. Her expression was one of undisputable triumph.

“Guilty.”

  **.....**

As the story goes, Quinn Fabray, the self proclaimed queen of chastity got pregnant. Not with her boyfriend, no that would be too predictable, but with his best friend who was neither Christian nor king of anything. The blonde high-ponytail cheer captain had an emotional breakdown, dipped her head in pepto bismol, pierced a few things, got a tramp stamp and became a chain smoking outcast. But then, she set a piano on fire in the middle of the school. With a cigarette. It was revealed that her all-American beauty symmetry was organic as Santana’s boobs, and that before McKinley, she was fat, pimply, with four eyes and a giant schnoz. Turns out, a mere year before her freshman year as the closest thing McKinley had to royalty, she was at the bottom of the foodchain, her existence addressed only in slurs. Not to be outdone by the time she got hit by a car, survived by some act of the God she’d all but given up on, and recovered beautifully from her paralysis. She premiered her ability to walk at, wait for it… prom. By standing up on stage, no warning. That one was maybe a little more orchestrated than the rest, but still within the theme here. For her final act, the teen mom, rebel near-dropout, cripple got into Yale. Fucking Yale, like the Ivy League Yale. And how could she not? You can’t write this shit.

Santana was laying amidst yet another one of Quinn’s plot twists inside a plot twist surprises. Naked, post sex, with an equally bare Quinn beneath a loosely lain sheet catching her breath. Of all the girls she rained terror upon in high school, she never would have pegged Quinn to be a notch in her bedpost. To be honest, Berry was most likely to dabble first by Santana’s observations.

But she should have seen it coming. It was Quinn’s way after all, predictably unpredictable. It certainly kept Santana on her toes when she was around.

Moments like this, with Quinn’s nuclear family photos on the wall, her peacoat strewn across a chair, and the Manhattan hum seeping through the cracks of the shoddy pre-war architecture, shed light on the context of this extracurricular they’d picked up. It felt a little bit out-of-body. Like it wasn’t happening, not to her at least.

But then she would look over at her, Quinn Quinn, who was in constant metamorphosis, and it no longer seemed so out of left field for her to attach her lips between Santana’s legs. And let her return the favor. It was another episode, another chapter, another layer of the chrysalis peeling away. The other versions of her best friend were all so easily segmented in hindsight. However, for this Quinn, the one she saw right next to her in this exact moment, Santana tried to piece together the picture of what Quinn she’ll be deemed in a few years time.

“You’re staring.”

Santana shook her head and inhaled deeply through her nose.

“Yeah, sorry I was thinking about shit.”

Quinn’s face softened in jest, and her eyes clouded with pride.

“Whatever,” she said, “Enjoy the view.” Santana scoffed and rolled over, the defenses of a caught 4th grade schoolboy. Quinn’s body rumbled against her back as she laughed. Santana tensed a little, the realization that they were touching rang somewhere in the distance.

Now facing Quinn’s night stand, she took in the contents of Quinn’s things carefully laid upon it. Besides her thrift store lamp, there wasn’t much. Her phone and it’s white power cord, the tail end of which disappeared between the wall and the stand. A stack of rings. A paperback book that was a little worse for wear. Atop the book coiled Quinn’s tiny golden cross. It twinkled in what it could reach of the dim kitchen light. Santana found herself fixating on it, as if it locked away all of Quinn’s secrets in it’s gold dipped iron grip.

Behind her, Quinn hummed sweetly, her languor evident in her voice. If there was ever a safe time to pry, post-sex would be it. Quinn was nearly drugged by her own hormones.

“Hey Q,” she called tentatively.

“Mmmmm?”

“Do you still go to church?”

“Haven’t in a while, now that you mention it.”

“Why’s that?”

“I guess it slipped my mind.”

"So are you like, still super Christian?"

Quinn hummed her little laugh, eyes drooping shut.

"There's not a punch card for sermons, San. And I'm not exactly saying grace at every meal either."

Santana’s measured breathing occupied her lungs as she stalled.

“But you still wear your cross all the time.”

It was a statement rather than a question. Quinn didn’t respond right away, and Santana could hear her apprehension building in the silence. Her eyes remained trained curiously on the necklace.

Quinn finally answered, “What are you really asking, San?”

Santana knew she had reached the limit of her brief open forum. She turned onto her back once again, and looked up at Quinn, who had sobered up from her sex induced stupor.

She licked her lips before she began, “I don’t know, it’s just a little strange how you were always so religious and shit in high school, you know?”

Quinn shrugged, hardly bothered, and her eyes searched Santana for where this was going.

“Well, I’m just curious how all of this,” Santana went on, gesturing to the mess they’d made of the bed, alluding to the perpetuity of it. “How it fits into all of that.”

Quinn wasn’t sure how to handle Santana dancing around topics. She was never sensitive to anything, and it freaked Quinn out a little. Santana wasn’t even making eye contact anymore. Perhaps it was the nature of the conversation that rubbed Santana the wrong way. She couldn’t be casual about these conversations, not when Santana’s own outing was so callous, snatched from her by people who hardly knew her. It still pained Quinn to recall the look on her face that day as everyone stared, everyone knew.

She gazed up at the ceiling, and pressed her lips together contemplatively. Santana took this time to grow nervous that she’d put her foot in her mouth yet again.

Finally, the blonde let the words flow smoothly from her tongue, “If a man lies with a man as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.”

It certainly wasn’t what Santana was expecting. She threw a look of faint confusion up at Quinn until her bedmate slowly turned to meet her stare. Quinn offered no further explanation and her face was stony, void of anything Santana could draw from.    

“That’s from the bible?” Santana confirmed. Quinn looked at her just the same and nodded. She was completely still, not rigid, but still, while Santana fidgeted like mad.

“Leviticus 20:13,” Quinn added. Santana processed this as she took her turn in staring at the ceiling.

“If man lies with man it’s an abomination. Like a sin,” Santana reasoned, although Quinn nodded slowly, as if it were a question. Santana’s fingers made crop circles in the bunching of the sheet as her eyes read invisible words across the white plaster above them. That was it? Those words were what condemned her at the hand of half the population, and maybe Quinn too if she chose to pursue this new pastime of hers.

They may be just friends, but this was what separated them, those words circling Quinn in a river of clapping rapids and a relentless current.

“So how do you explain to yourself what we’ve been doing, if you’re still all buddy buddy with Jesus?” Santana inquired, gesturing again to their unspoken activities.

Santana barely caught the slight furrow in Quinn’s brow, her eyes flitting over Santana’s naked form to glance at her golden cross. Something seemed to be rolling around in her head, and Santana paused her circling forefinger to watch it unfurl.

It didn’t take long, and soon, Quinn was tracing her own finger up and down the gap between Santana’s ribcage.

“Well,” Quinn said, hushed as if they were being overheard. Santana lay waiting as Quinn’s eyes followed her fingers and palm as they made their way across her flesh, to run her thumb along the soft patch of skin beneath her breast. Goosebumps erupted in their wake.

“Well?” Santana egged her on. Quinn licked her lips, her thoughts coming together on her smile like threads weaving into silk.

“Weeellll,” she repeated, her tone now playful as she loomed over Santana. Quinn’s torso was pressed so flush, she could feel the contracting of Quinn's lungs beneath her alabaster skin. Their hips aligned beneath the sheet and the contact hitched Santana's breath rather audibly.

“I just remind myself…” Quinn continued. Santana quirked her eyebrow at Quinn’s promise of an explanation still hanging in the now diminishing air between them. In turn, Quinn bared her teeth in a hungry grin.

“We are not men.”


	4. Step

**April 2015**

****...** **

The bar they selected was no five star institution by any standard, that was for sure. The bodies of after work twenty-somethings were packed in like sheep in a barn stall. The air stuffy from overuse and body heat with nowhere to go. Music emanated from somewhere like a throbbing pulse, only the thump of the bass to be heard over the din. The space was probably half submerged underground, and the lacquered bar took up half the room.

Quinn and Santana had secured a spot against said bar, thank god. They nursed drinks they didn't purchase and wore coy smiles they wouldn't share. Santana sucked down her whiskey with her head bent towards Quinn, who was in mid joke, a girl in an unfortunate animal print at 5 o'clock her victim.

Maybe they were drunk again. Maybe that's how Santana's hand found it's way onto her waist. And maybe it's why Quinn was so enthralled with the velvet of Santana's collar bone beneath her fingertip. She idly grazed it with her elbow stationed between two puddles of sloshed drink casualties on the bar. The mass of people around them merely a sea of bodies, breaking against the shores of the bar in splashes of clinking glass and snapping fingers.

Here, the body language spelled out the sectioning of the crowd. Two necks bent down exchanging wry smiles, rings of square shoulders, and then there was them, grappling with gravity and hands everywhere and nowhere. If they had been somewhere in Chelsea and not downtown, there would be no mistaking their coupling.

But here, amidst the button down bro's and girls caked in foundation and desperation, they just looked like two very close college friends who liked to do things together. Everything together.

That was their game, and they excelled at it.

Dizzy with vodka numbing her tongue, Quinn was very confident of that fact. She clung to her drink, it's slick layer of condensation making that difficult, and opened her mouth to release a hearty laugh at something Santana said, although she couldn't recall what was so funny about it. They had won themselves 3 drinks each so far, and one round of celebratory shots with the bartender. She had been especially impressed with their tactics.

Quinn giggled into her drink as Santana's words tickled her ear. She found herself leaning into it, her chest heavy under the weight of her shallow breathing. Her hand tightened even further around the cheap tumbler when Santana carelessly grazed her bottom lip across her ear lobe. It was just carelessly, though.

"You're looking a little dry there, want a refill?"

Her eyes flew open at the voice presumably addressing her. Why the hell were they closed?

A textbook investment boy stood before her; chestnut hair swept to the side, crisp french blue shirt, single pleats with a tailor-made break, and a lopsided smile. One tall drink of water, as her mother would say.

Santana nudged her after what was probably an uncomfortable silence at her hand.

"Oh, um, yes, now that you mention it. Good eye," she recovered. From behind cardboard cutout boy came his clone, only dipped into a blonde color palette. He nodded at Santana and began salivating like a terrier. It would be an easy one for her best friend, Quinn could tell already.

She accepted the fresh glass of her most likely well vodka and cranberry with a shy smile. He was a junior something or other at J.P. Morgan, she found out. They bonded over their midwestern roots. He actually had witty jokes to accompany her trained laughter. Quinn sank into their rapport with as much contention as submerging her sunsoaked body into a backyard pool. He apologetically took an email for a beat that popped up on his Blackberry, corporate grade, and Quinn glanced to her left.

Santana was already fixated on Quinn and the progress of her new plaything. The blonde smirked in her direction, assuredly, that he was none the wiser. However, Santana's concern didn't wane. It was subdued dramatically by her whiskey haze, but it remained concerned nonetheless. Maybe it wasn't concern. It was something she'd seen before, though. If only she could see straight enough to put her finger on it…

"Sorry about that… Quinn right?"

Jack (Jake?) drew her back in with his woolen voice. She laughed, letting her eyes fall to her drink swirling in her hand and affirmed his guess. They carried on as before, him leaning against the bar like he was at a senior mixer. By her guess, that stage of his life was not that far gone. His shoulders were not yet burdened. His shoes still held their shine. Her hand resting on his forearm lightly drew him in; the puppeteer deftly commanding her strings, and she was sure her intoxication was showing a little in her flushed cheeks. He liked college football more than professional, and used to love that ice cream parlor in Cincinnati too, but he was more of a rocky road kind of guy. It was a lot like the one near his apartment in Gramercy. They don't allow dogs, but the next one he gets he'll make sure is pet friendly.

Shit, wait, his apartment?

"It's got a great view if later you wanted to come see it," John (no, Jim?) trailed off. He scratched the back of his head and grimaced at Quinn's apparently obvious hesitation. "I'm sorry if that came off sleazy, shit."

Quinn shook her head, to both deny his statement and to get herself together. He was sweet, sort of.

"No, it wasn't the worst I've heard," she told him, patting his starched sleeve as he took a soothing gulp of his amber drink. He reddened a little and laughed despite himself.

"Okay, good," he said, still shaky from his fumble. He gravitated towards Quinn and she could see his green eyes drink her up in the dim lighting. "Because you're really nice, and pretty, and I don't want to make you feel…"

"She said no, buddy."

Quinn didn't have to turn around to hear where the voice thick with warning came from. She felt the radiating territorial heat against her back; Santana's presence ever unmistakable.

Justin (wait, no..) looked up, but didn't put any distance between them.

"I know, I wasn't…" he tried, but Santana took another step into their bubble.

"Then why don't you back off?" she snapped. Her hand found its way to Quinn's shoulder. The touch shook her from her spectatorship and she tried to turn towards Santana.

"It's fine, he wasn't doing anything, San," she soothed. Santana had finished her drink, and was clenching the fist where it once was.

"Oh, pleeeease, everyone in this bar knows what he was doing, Q," Santana slurred. The whiskey had only stoked this fire, it seems. Quinn stood squarely in front of her friend, she wasn't going to have a scene.

"Santana, relax, I'm fine," Quinn hissed.

"You're drunk, why don't you go sit down," Josh (it'll do) told her. His Adonis friend came up behind her and put a calming hand on Santana's arm, but it only escalated the already volatile situation.

"Get the fuck off me!" Santana shrieked. She shook him off with all the force needed to take down a tiger, and turned on him. "You don't know who you're fucking with, asshole. I'll rip your goldilocks out of your head, down to the root!" If Quinn hadn't pulled Santana into her and deadlocked her arms, she might have gotten a chunk. Quinn combed her memories for how she had always restrained a "Lima Heights" Santana back in high school, but her liquor addled brain could barely recall Santana's drink count.

"Santana calm down, we're leaving," Quinn spat in her ear, through clenched teeth. She dragged her, shoving her wallet into her fists, away from the quivering wingman with his hands held high like he was in a stick up. He wasn't far off, actually. She shot an apologetic look at Jason (at this point who cares). He shook his head and turned from the scene without a second thought.

Santana hadn't calmed down in the slightest by the time Quinn had hauled her, kicking and screaming, out onto the pavement, glistening under the city lights after a day of rain. She was still ranting and raving, hands gesticulating wildly about.

"Santana please!" Quinn cried. Her outburst seemed to halt whatever had been spewing from Santana's mouth. She stood, chest heaving and staring at Quinn like she was the one deranged.

"I know he looked like a direct descendent of Adam, but come on, he had Wall Street scumbag all over him," Santana reasoned. She'd lowered her volume at least. Quinn was still fuming.

"What the hell is wrong with you, we could have gotten kicked out, or… or arrested!" Quinn exclaimed. Santana stumbled backwards at the placement of blame, clearly taken aback.

"Are you seriously pissed at me? I did you a fucking favor, Fabray!" she proclaimed. She held her hand to her collar bone in self-recognition.

"Oh yeah? What favor was that? Saving me from the big, bad, financially stable halfway-decent guy?" Quinn replied, more vexed than angry, really. It was all so dramatic and quite frankly, she was tired and he was easy and why couldn't anything ever be easy?

Santana scoffed, nearly lost her grip on her clutch as she waved it about, and snarled back, "What exactly was your plan, Quinn? You were going to go back to his place, pray he wasn't some Patrick Bateman in the making, let him fuck you once or twice and then what? Did you actually think he was going to offer you breakfast tomorrow morning, besides his own limp 5 inch sausage?"

Quinn's hair fell into her face as her head shook side to side. There was no way to reason when she was this far gone, drunk on entitled rage backed by the distilled grains sloshing in her stomach or whatever whiskey was derived from.

Santana deflated, and reached for Quinn's hand to pull them towards a cab.

"Whatever, lets just go."

"No," Quinn declined. She pulled her hand close, as if it might follow on it's own against her will. Santana retracted her own apprehensively. "You're drunk, San, go home."

Santana crossed her arms and leaned into her incredulity.

"Alone," Quinn emphasized. Her tongue enunciated bitingly and she stood on the zippy side street a pillar of immovable anger.

Santana clicked her tongue in her cheek and growled, "Whatever." She backed away, swaying a little as she extended her arm to hail a cab. Her glare morphed into an eye roll and by the time she turned around a cab had squealed to a halt before her.

Quinn watched her clamor into the belly of the yellow beast and as the taxi sped off towards Brooklyn, she sent a text to Rachel.

Sent drunk Santana home in a cab. Text me when she's gets there?

She had no more than hoisted herself up into a flagged cab of her own when her phone lit up.

_Will do. I'm making toast as I text._

**.....**

Santana groaned as her consciousness began to illuminate behind her eyelids and filter through the sweet, dark oblivion of her sleep. She was horizontal, still constricted by the stupid dress she'd worn, and her hair was sticking to the side of her mouth. She was a vision, truly. In a great stretch and scrunching of her face, she finally forced her eyes to open, and brought her world into focus.

She nearly leaped out of her skin at the sight of Rachel Berry, poised and beaming in that pitiful way where she was so there for you. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, which was still made as Santana sprawled out spread eagle atop it.

"Jesus christ, Berry. What the fuck," she mumbled. Her voice felt and sounded like she swallowed gravel.

"You came home drunk and I fed you and put you to bed," she announced. Her bangs shook as she nodded to herself, for what reason Santana couldn't fathom.

"Do you want a medal?" she deadpanned. Rachel smiled.

"No thank you, I've got plenty of those," she said sweetly. She held out a full mug, more like a preemptive caffeinated peace offering. "I figured you might need a pick me up."

Santana sat up slowly to receive it, although her body creaked in protest to the movement, or maybe that was the bed. She gripped the handle and slurped the steaming liquid beneath the dollop of foam that floated happily on top.

"Mm, is this from that fancy new robot you got for Christmas? Hanukkah, or whatever," Santana asked.

Rachel nodded, "The Nespresso machine, yes! It's great isn't it? You can use it whenever you want, or just ask me and I'll make you something." She seemed to fidget in her seat in excitement at this much dialogue being exchanged between the two of them. Santana might have been disturbed by it as well, had she had any wits about her at all.

"Look at you, you're like one of those helpful little house elves that make shoes or presents. You even manage to look the part," she gibed. Rachel hummed in faux agreement and stood up from her perch. She made to walk back into the living area but paused, and tried to fight the urge to pry, ultimately succumbing to it.

"So what did you do?" she piped up. Santana, who was engrossed in the consumption of her coffee blinked at her.

"Um, what?" Santana rasped. Rachel crossed her arms as her disapproval took over.

"I mean, what did you do to Quinn to make her so mad at you?" Rachel prodded.  
Santana chortled, standing up to peel off her day old clothes in favor of something more forgiving on her senses.

"That is none of your business, and anyway, why do you always assume it's me, Berry?" she snapped. Rachel bristled a little and looked away bashfully as Santana's shimmied out of her dress.

Recovering, she replied, "Well you came in last night in a tizzy about how much of a bitch she was and how much you hate her which means that you did something." Santana had popped her head through a t-shirt that was a few inches shorter than it probably should have been. A wince of regret flashed across her features. She hated how her incessantly nosey roommate was always right about everything. Only a few minutes after waking up and she already had to relive her drunken mishaps. She said as much as she glared at Rachel on her plod into the kitchen. "Don't walk away from me!" she heard her grumble.

A familiar spicy aroma emanated from where Kurt stood at the stove and Santana scowled. He continued to break up his sizzling breakfast with his spatula, unaware of her standing behind him.

"Is that my chorizo, Hummel?" she growled. He jumped about 2 feet backwards from his eggs. She was about to rip him a new one when Berry came scurrying across the tile.

"Don't avoid the subject Santana," she chastised her. Santana whipped around to give her the best 'fuck off' glower she could muster as Kurt slunk off with his plate of eggs into his room. She felt those invasive eyes narrow at her in return as she navigated her way around the couch to plop down and turn on the television.

Her head was pounding and the back of her skull felt like a nail was hammered into it and Rachel suddenly blocked her view of whatever reality show rerun was squabbling on MTV.

"What are you doing, Santana?" she scolded with her hands on her hips. Santana dropped her head backwards onto the back of the couch and groaned. She heard the soft stomps of Rachel approaching her and felt the remote ripped from her limp grasp. "Go fix it!" she cried.

"For fuck's sake, can I regain consciousness first?" Santana griped. She tried to massage her temples, hoping it would erase Berry from her line of sight when she sat upright again. To no avail. She stood before her, fuming for no real reason other than her need to shove her giant beak into everyone's business. Not even everyone. Just Santana.

Rachel made it quite clear she wasn't budging. And frankly, her fuming mug was a little terrifying. She was prematurely gifted at this whole Jewish guilt thing.

"Fine," Santana relented, "I'll fix it. Just… stop looking at me like that, it'll make it hard to get to sleep tonight." Rachel broke character at the effectiveness of her own tactics for a beat, and then she resumed her stance. Santana had begun her trudge back into the solitude of her room.

"Wait," Rachel called, "You aren't going to tell me what happened?"

"No fucking way. So you can, what, add it to your Quinn and Santana journal you've been keeping score in since 10th grade?" Santana jeered. Rachel was so flustered her words only came out in clipped "never's" and "I don't's" amidst nonsensical sounds. Santana didn't give her a chance to deny it before she shut the door on their conversation. She could still hear the muttering through the wood as Rachel carried on outside. It made Santana wonder if maybe that wasn't such a crazy accusation.

Quinn enjoyed the guilty pleasures of cupcakes, as most uppity blonde white girls do, and that's where Santana found herself within the hour, waiting outside Magnolia at 30 Rock for her best friend. For a Sunday, it was pretty desolate, and Santana was nothing if not grateful for that. She didn't want a huge audience for this confrontation. It's not like she was opposed to apologizing, she had done enough of that in her lifetime, for sure.

This time she had crossed a line, a big, fat, white line painted on the ground and she just waltzed right over it. She was so stupid. Stupid booze and stupid boys and stupid Quinn for getting her all mixed up in the same bullshit that drowned her in high school.

Now she had to sit here, and convince Quinn, and herself, that she was just drunk and she didn't mean to get territorial and this is nothing to her. Quinn is nothing to her, except a friend. And old friend who she has sex with occasionally. Period. Full stop.

God this sucks. Her stupid fucking temper.

A mop of blonde emerged from the subway entrance to her right and Santana nodded her over. Quinn approached her with a wry smile and took her hands out of her pea coat pockets to receive the pastel peace offering.

"What's this? Trying to bribe me into forgiving you?" Quinn asked playfully. She popped open the box and surveyed her gift.

"Maybe," Santana replied, a little too earnestly. She shook it off, and plucked a speckled chocolate egg from atop one of the confections. "Anyways, nobody should spend Easter Sunday alone, especially a good christian like you, Q."

Quinn raised one eyebrow in disbelief but didn't comment. She picked up a cupcake and took a bite, then scrunched her nose almost instantly.

"You know you just paid way too much for subpar cupcakes, right?" Quinn taunted. Santana threw her hands in the air.

"Yeah, well I'm not the cupcake aficionado like you are, Quinn. I just googled cupcakes and NYC and this was what came up first," she snarled, with her arms crossed. "If they're that horrible, I'll eat them all." She made to snatch the box back, but Quinn kept them out of her reach, eyes sparkling with mirth at Santana's vexation.

"I'll eat them, I'm just giving you a hard time," she assured her. She took another bite and began to walk with Santana down the street through Rockefeller Center. The wind whipped down 49th street and burned their faces with faint frostbite, but all in all it was a tepid spring day.

Quinn led them silently past the gilded buildings of the tourist trap. She passed the box laterally to Santana who helped herself to a mint green one with chocolate cake. Quinn seemed much less off put than she had been the night before, almost like she'd forgotten why the cupcake bribery was necessary. She was preoccupied with the art deco deities made of metals and who knows what else, set into the cement above the entryways of all the buildings. If she wasn't completely on edge waiting for Quinn to open the floor for a very uncomfortable conversation, she might have found them interesting too.

Still, all the way to 5th Avenue they'd made it, and no flicker of vindictive Quinn. It was actually more terrifying, this suspense. Quinn most certainly knew that, with her slow, even steps. She wanted Santana to simmer in her own imagination for a little.

"I'm not mad anymore, so you can stop looking at me like I'm going to throw these cupcakes in your face," Quinn spoke, after what seemed like hours.

"Oh," Santana breathed. "okay..."

Quinn looked up at the buildings poking at the clear sky, "We've known each other for a long time, San. I get it. It's a natural instinct when we're here in this new place."

Santana swallowed a lump, "You do?" she questioned, not expecting this. Quinn turned to her and smiled affectionately. Santana reddened.

"Well yeah, you care about me, and I care about you," she continued. Santana tried to regulate her breathing. "It's only natural that when a guy comes up to me like that, that you react the way you did." Santana groped in the blind recesses of her mind for words but her mouth hung open slightly, just gulping in air as they crossed the Avenue that was blocked off, strangely enough. Quinn strolled out into the street, looking left and only left as street savvy locals only do. Santana might have made a dry comment on Quinn's newfound confidence, how she wove in between the pedestrians with ease. If she was tasked with spotting her on the street, she would never have pinned the blonde head cooly bobbing in and out of sight. Slowing to a more leisurely speed, Quinn sat them both down on some steps and placed the box between them.

"Look, I appreciate it, I do," Quinn went on. Santana felt herself tense up. This was it, it was taking this turn now, down the road of gentle rejection. Not that there was really anything to reject, they weren't a thing. Not really. "I guess I got so angry because I don't need anyone to protect me anymore, San. I've made it this far by myself and I'm pretty proud of that."

It's ok, just take it, because it doesn't matter because her and Quinn aren't like that… wait what?

She must have said that out loud because Quinn was looking at her strangely.

"I said I don't need you fighting my battles. But its ok, you just were doing what you used to always do when we were younger," Quinn reiterated. Santana was still stuck on the first part, slowly digesting it.

"So, that's why you were pissed at me?" she managed to get out, digressing only slightly. Quinn furrowed her brow and cocked her head to the side

"Yes," Quinn confirmed, apprehensively. She looked quite befuddled when Santana let out a belly of air and even laughed a little. Well the bullet had barely grazed her ear but she had somehow dodged it. "What did you think I was mad about?" Quinn asked.

Shit. She froze again, and the way Quinn was looking at her, as attentive as a hawk eying his dying prey, she knew a lie wouldn't get past her, not a word.

"I, um, I guess I thought you were all in a gay panic over me being super territorial," she sputtered. Not the most delicate phrasing, but oh well. There it was. Quinn made a thin line with her lips. Santana grabbed a cupcake and proceeded to blockade her mouth with it, in case any other repressed thoughts decided to burst forth.

"Oh that," Quinn said. She peered at Santana trying to hold it together out of the corner of her eye and a smirk crept up into her cheek. "I don't mind that, I mean it was actually kind of hot." At this, Santana choked on the dry cake filling her airway. Quinn nipped lightly at her own pink treat as she looked out into the street, grinning cheekily at her own doing.

Santana swallowed lumps of cake furiously in an attempt to put respiratory system at ease. As the sun rose to bathe the street in warmth, it hit Quinn's face and Santana found herself doing that terribly cliched act of staring dumbly. She just couldn't help it, and until she cleared her throat, there wasn't much else to do but admire this upgrade she didn't remember trading the old Quinn for.

That girl, doe-eyed with clips in her hair and a tearful chip on her shoulder, was gone. Sitting next to her was this independent and self actualized person, more so that she had been in their former years as insecure head bitches in charge, surviving solely off of green juices and the fearful admiration of their peers. Quinn didn't have to convince Santana; she saw it now. Somewhere along the line, her best friend had built a more sturdy version of herself out of the sticks and stones she'd been bombarded with all her life. Some of those stones cast by Santana herself. This Quinn didn't need protection, not anymore.

Well shit, Fabray.

If Quinn was aware of Santana staring at her, she let her indulge.

"Hot, huh?" Santana finally managed to croak, hoping the moment hadn't passed. Quinn looked back in her direction and shrugged.

"Sure. Every girl wants to be wanted like that, to be the one people fight over," she elaborated. Quinn held the conversation as if they were talking about the consistency of the frosting and not Santana proclaiming Quinn as hers. It freaked Santana out, so it must not sit well with tight-like-my-bond-with-Jesus Quinn, on Easter of all days.

"Okay," she sighed, narrowing her eyes at Quinn who lapped at the creamy topping innocently. "McKinley's favorite damsel in distress slays her own dragons now. Noted."

Quinn nodded, and added, "Yep, took a page out of your book. The results exceed my expectations." She stared intently at Santana, as if the words were placeholders for her mouth while something else entirely danced behind her eyes. Still, she licked the frosting. Lick, lick, lick. It was so damn hypnotizing.

Before Santana could make heads or tails of any of it, a mass of technicolor seemed to take over the street in front of them, out of nowhere. People adorned with what appeared to be parade floats on their heads were wandering around in the vacant space where 5th Avenue was usually bumper to bumper with vehicles.

A peal of laughter erupted from Quinn, and she stood up suddenly.

"Oh my god, it's the Easter Parade! I forgot about this!" she exclaimed. She looked down at Santana who was befuddled by what was happening. Quinn bent down to grab the box of what was left of the cupcakes and began climbing the steps. "Come on! Lets get up higher so we can see better."

Santana groaned as she stood up. Turning around, she realized that in her emotional crisis, she didn't realize they were sitting on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Quinn had settled on a spot on the northern corner of the elevation, against one of the turrets of the scaffolding obscuring the facade. Santana made her way over to her blonde companion. She was already craning her neck to take it all in.

It was bizarre, that's for sure. Most people were in head-to-toe costumes based around their headgear. There were the occasional old black ladies dressed to the nines in their sun hats and frilly dresses, but the rest were all about their art installations. What any of this menagerie of costumes had to do with Easter, Santana hadn't the slightest idea. But Quinn seemed to be enjoying the spectacle, and so they stood on the steps and enjoyed the view.

"This is as close to a church as I'll ever get, just so you know," Santana quipped. Quinn grinned back at her wickedly and nodded.

She quipped right back at her, "Yeah, you'd probably light on fire otherwise. Don't want to risk it." There might have been an actual glint in her eye, like the sort poems waxed dramatically on and on about. It also might have been the sunlight. Who can say.

Santana laughed as she bumped Quinn's shoulder, agreeing, "Exactly."


	5. Everlasting Arms

**_..._ **

**May 2015**

**...**

Quinn swore she could hear typing in her sleep, it echoed in her head so incessantly these days. Today especially, it was all around her. Dead air, no talking, no music or movement, just the clacking of keyboards in the intern alcove.

It didn't help that it was one of those filler days. The sort of day where time drags its sulky hands around the face of the clock and it so happened to coincide with the first blossoming day of spring in the city. It looked that way, at least. Quinn wouldn't know. Her commute to the law firm was shrouded in daybreak mist and she had been chained to her cubicle ever since. From what she could see out the conference room, which was thankfully a glass room, the sun beamed and even the cool steel of the adjacent skyscraper was warmed by it's appearance after all this time in the dark of winter.

But it was Tuesday and only 10 a.m. and lunch was a lifetime away. She had been swimming in paperwork all morning and by the looks of it, it would be another day of nipping down to the concourse for a salad and shoveling it into her mouth at her desk.

It came with the intern territory, Quinn knows.

So, she picked up her pen and abandoned her sunny whims to resume the tasks she'd been given that day. No sense in pining after what she knew she couldn't have. It never did her any good.

She was only a few into the stack on her left when her boss's secretary hovered expectantly over the low wall behind her computer. Quinn lifted her head and awaited instruction.

"Your school called," she stated, her Queens accent weighing down on the vowels of her baritone voice. "Said something about a meeting with your advisor that got rescheduled. You're dismissed for the day."

Quinn blinked up at her painstakingly attended eyebrows. That was strange, she didn't have a meeting scheduled in the first place. Should she talk to her boss about this? Although, the secretary was technically responsible for the comings and goings of her group of interns, so if she said to hightail it, no need to run it by the head of the department. She managed a confused nod, and went to go pick up her phone and call the advising office for more information.

Her cell was already alight with a text from Santana.

_I'm busting you out._

Quinn's cheeks fought the oncoming grin as she gathered her things, grabbed her trench coat, and tried to not have too much of a skip in her step as she traipsed down the marble floored corridor past her visibly envious fellow interns. She watched the numbers in the elevator descend, tongue in her cheek to keep her glee at bay.

Sure enough, Santana was waiting at the foot of the building. She craned her neck and stood stiffly as she furrowed her brow in faux interest in the fountain. A proud smile formed as she turned to Quinn, emerging from the revolving door.

"Ah, here she is, Miss Fabray," Santana purported. She puffed her chest out, and her voluminous mane gave her the likeness of some sort of ridiculous forest creature. "I need your legal counseling."

Quinn crossed her arms, "You dragged me down here because you did something reckless and stupid?" She hardly contained her lack of surprise.

"I haven't  _yet_ ," Santana corrected, waving a finger. "If I put a stray cat in Rachel's room and she died because of her allergy, would that mean I would go to jail?"

"Santana!"

"Technically, the cat is the murderer, I only enabled it. So that makes me an accessory or an accomplice?"

"You can't kill Rachel," Quinn declared rather firmly.

"Mmm, no, not kill her. See, the goal here is to just incapacitate her. So I can breathe for a few days without her incessant pecking up in my face all the time." Santana looked at Quinn like this was perfectly reasonable, a fair repercussion to Rachel's probably innocuous offenses.

Quinn sighed and offered, "I'll ask around for you."

"Gee thanks, Q," Santana beamed, linking their arms together. "Aren't you a pal."

They meandered down 6th Avenue in the late morning warmth. Quinn's assumptions from her office roost has been correct. The entire avenue was buzzing with suits who had shed their blazers and emerged in energetic full force for the first tepid spring day. The early lunch crowd had decided to dip out even earlier, it seemed, as they navigated through the throngs of grinning young financials and trays of the first iced coffees of the season. As they approached the fountains, the edges were at full occupancy, packed butt to butt like a middle school cafeteria with food trucks crammed into the side streets. Everywhere you looked was a blended mass of the varying shades of Brooks Brother's baby blue, from pastel almost down to slate. Watching corporate New York emerge from hibernation was the most joyful celebration of spring Quinn had ever seen.

By the time they reached the cavernous entrance to the subway, Quinn had her own coat draped off of her arm and her own case of spring fever.

Turns out, the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens are free on Tuesdays. Santana's favorite kind of activity is free, so Quinn was not surprised that it was the itinerary. They packed in against the railing of the little hut on the koi pond amongst a gaggle of hasidic school girls in their navy pleats. The pond stretched out to the far left, lined with drooping willows and footpaths winding up hills and out of sight. It was so quiet, the loudest sound was the plop of the fish and the turtles as they broke the surface of the water.

"Who knew all of this was hiding in Brooklyn?" Santana remarked. Quinn agreed, and wrapped Santana's hand in her own, pressing on to explore more of the gardens.

Santana's impulse was spot on. It was peak season for almost everything. One after the other, they moved through swaths of citrus colored tulips and trees drooping with delicate magnolias, lily pad ponds and a cluster of gleaming old victorian greenhouses. They snuck sandwiches from the cafe down to the green between two lanes of cherry trees so prim and proper, it would seem a old English country house should sit at the other end. The blossoms bore the most delicious shade of plum, and they smelled equally as mouth watering.

Head to head, they laid down on the grass beneath the aquiline sky and they probably would have named the shapes of the clouds that passed, if only there were clouds to be seen. Instead, Quinn nestled the crown of her head against Santana's shoulder, and felt their cheeks graze, they laid so close.

It had been a long time since she had experienced the weightless sublime of freedom. It hit her how much she needed this, twenty-one years had come and gone in flashes like lens flares and darting express trains, spent and stowed away now in drawers and boxes and eight dollar frames. It scared her, bottomed out her stomach, that she was in fact getting older, speeding along down a track that wasn't going to slow down.

And yet, they were both still young, terrifyingly so. With the grass tickling her calves and the adrenaline of hookey, she actually felt her burning scarlet muscles and her quickening pulse. Quinn basked in the remains of her youth. She inhaled twenty-one for the first time, unfettered by filial burdens of the past or exhausting ambitions for the future. It made her giddy to the point where her cheeks ached from her grin.

She had her qualms with Santana, that's for sure, but her emotional intuition was spot on when it came to Quinn. No one else had ever cared enough to think about her like that. She turned the notion over in her mind that, if Santana was the only one she had managed to hold on to, out of all the people she'd burned through in high school, that might be enough. She reminded herself that Brittany had also been a recipient of this special treatment, to keep the self-satisfied tingle at bay.

She dared to compliment Santana on their destination choice, and Santana quipped how she knows all the hot places in town, and Quinn should never doubt her. Quinn was quick to remind her of the Chinese massage parlor that Santana had led them to, claiming rock bottom prices, only for them to figure out it was because most people went there for the "happy ending."

Santana hummed a rumbling laugh at the memory, and Quinn could feel her cheek crinkle to accommodate the smile. She leaned into it without a second thought, twiddling her cross between her thumb and forefinger. Santana had ripped a chunk out of the turkey and swiss, and she held the sandwich over her head to pass it over, but let go before Quinn's fingers could grasp it. The sandwich came down, splat on her face, throwing Santana into another laughing spell. Quinn fell victim to Santana's infectious snicker as she swiped the mayonnaise from her cheek and swatted Santana's face with their lunch.

Santana followed Quinn with no complaints through every maze of manicured hedges and across every lawn and thicket of lavender and tangerine flora, seeming to sprout from every rock and patch of dirt. Quinn finally stopped for a beat at the bluebell wood behind two older women drawing the endless expanse of indigo before them. Something out of a fairytale, they completely covered the ground around thick oak trees in every direction, bathed in light here and there by gaps in the canopies overhead.

Santana's snicker spun Quinn around.

"What?" she snapped at her friend's bemused smirk.

Santana shrugged, "Nothing, Q. Carry on."

Quinn led them down the small path through the bluebells with Santana still grinning like a cat with a mouse between it's paws.

"Seriously, what?" she laughed, because it was hard not to laugh at such an expression.

"You're just such a cliche, Fabray," Santana decreed. Quinn's mouth hung open.

"Why, because I like flowers?"

"You should have seen your face. You were all moony-eyed and shit, like you're in one of those old movies and your name is something like Rebecca Grace Hawthorne, you know?" Santana explained. She stepped in front of Quinn, her face morphing into one of pure adoration and shock. She put on a horrible southern accent and drawled, "Oh, Henry, these are just 'bout the most  _mahhhvelous_  bluebells I've ever seen. Oh my stars, I feel like the luckiest girl in all of Geawwwwgia!"

Quinn shoved her before she fell into a fit of snickering along with her, trying to defend herself feebly, "Shut up, I don't even talk like that..."

The sun began to wane as it filtered through the ivy crawling down from the lattice. They strolled lazily up the final bend, opting out of the rose garden, because Quinn decided it was "too cliche" and Santana guffawed, glad to know where Quinn drew the line. The hedge lined steps ascending to the Osborne garden led to an open blue sky. It wasn't until they reached the top that they could take in perhaps the most masterful of the gardens thus far.

A stone fountain rested before them as the point of symmetry for the mirrored lanes on either side of a shamrock green lawn. Hedges lined with fuchsia bushes ran alongside the arbors shading the paths, one after the other, dripping with wisteria. Even Santana's eyebrows rose, and she smiled as the picked a side to start down. The whole setting seemed transplanted from an old Victorian fairy tale, almost as if the flowers had sprouted from the pages themselves.

Quinn's neck ached from staring up at the sheets of periwinkle by the time they reached a unbroken semicircle of concrete benches that cupped the end of the garden.

"Oh I've heard of these! They're called the whisper benches," Quinn exclaimed. She scurried over to the corner closest to them and wedged herself as close to the pillar as possible.

"What the hell are you doing."

"Go sit at the other end!"

"Um, why?"

"Trust me! Just go, San."

Santana huffed and plodded over to the other end, plopped herself down on the bench. Quinn turned her head and whispered.

"Santana…"

Nothing. Santana sat slouched against the arc of the stone, unmoved. She tried cupping her mouth and increasing her volume a little.

"Santana, can you hear me?"

Still nothing. Although, Santana was looking at her like she was a crazy person. She leaned forward to stand, but Quinn waved her hands for her to stay sitting. She complied with another huff, and Quinn cleared her throat.

"San, can you hear this?" she tried again at a normal speaking volume. Santana sat up with a start, and she could faintly hear her spew an expletive or two. Quinn laughed, and continued, "Say something!"

Santana mimicked her and Quinn strained her ear to pick up her words.

"If you can hear me, Berry sucks."

Quinn's shoulders slumped in exasperation, as the faint echo of Santana chuckling at herself filled the garden.

"That's all you could think of?" Quinn chided her as she approached where she sat still the cheshire cat she was.

"Its the first thing that came to my mind," she replied with a shrug. Fortunately, the gates were just behind the benches, so Quinn could drag her onto the streets of Brooklyn before she called her "Miss Rebecca Grace" one more time.

**...**

Santana dumped her keys and purse on the little table Rachel insisted on putting next to the door so they could be "civilized." The slam of the door closing reverberated throughout the apartment.

"Benefit of being home all day during the week? The sparkle squad is at work and I have the place to myself," said Santana, as she waltzed over to the living room window and flung it open.

"It really is quieter, almost eerie," Quinn agreed. She had reemerged from Santana's room, where she helped herself to a pair of sweatpants to get out of her corporate clothes. Santana eyed her and held back a little smile at the sight, not to mention that she didn't even ask, or assume she needed to.

Quinn joined her on the sofa, stretching out with a sigh of relief at getting off her feet.

"Hey, I want to show you something," Santana declared. She points the remote at the tv and clicks through a few things, before some movie plays with explosions and what not. "Check it out!" Santana points to the info-box at the foot of the screen.

Quinn sits up and cries, "HBO? No shit? Since when?"

"Since last month," Santana bragged smugly.

"You've been hiding HBO from me for a month? Bitch," Quinn growled. She snatched the remote from Santana's hands, and pulled up the on-demand menu.

Santana reclined on the couch with her hands behind her head, and sighed, "I know, it's actually amazing. It's our first real adult purchase. I mean what's next? A four door sedan? Central air conditioning?"

Quinn snorted, and groaned wistfully, "Even I'm jealous."

"Well, have at it Q," Santana offered, "Pick something, whatever your little basic cable heart desires." Quinn was already ahead of her, and she was going through a few episodes of something.

"Do you watch VEEP? It's hilarious, we're watching it," she not so much asked, but

announced as she finally picked one.

"What's it about?"

"It's about if the Vice President was…"

"Ugh, Quinn of course."

"It's good! It's chock full of dry feminist humor, which is basically you, and you said I can pick, and oh look, it's starting."

Santana grumbled and kicked her legs up on the coffee table in begrudging acquiesce while Quinn sank down into the couch, pleased.

By the time the end credits rolled, Santana had to admit it  _was_  funny. She was all for some girl power, sure, and she felt a special connection to that Sue character. She wouldn't acknowledge that it was refreshing to sit with Quinn so unwound, laughing, her hair up in a stubby ponytail, and all that, and how it made it easy to get into the damn show when Quinn selected the next episode.

The breeze had found their window, making a few tentative rounds through the apartment. Neither of them had bothered to flick on any lights, so they lounged the afternoon away in the waning sunlight. Santana supplied them with some tortilla chips and a likely stale bottle of wine, and they munched and choked on the crumbs with their laughter and drank straight from the bottle. By the third episode Quinn had fallen against her side, and Santana was acutely aware of the movements of her jaw against her shoulder as she crunched on the chips. By the 8th episode, Quinn's head was in her lap, drooling slightly as sleep took over. It wasn't cute, it wasn't.

Santana absentmindedly stroked the loose tendrils of hair that slipped out of her ponytail. She figured she might as well finish the episode, now that she didn't hate the show so much, and the bag of chips was mostly demolished, so might as well polish that off too. She may not fully understand it, but she could just tack it onto the list of things involving Quinn she would never understand.

She basked in her choice of afternoon activity and smiled as her head hit the back of the couch. It was nice, the tv running, the empty bottle of wine, Quinn weighing down her leg. It was really nice. It felt nice. Being with Quinn felt nice.

She almost hurled the bottle at whoever barged through the door and broke her reverie, bags banging and keys clamoring. It was Rachel, because of course it was, and of course she executed every entrance with the same dramatic flair she employed on the stage.

"Hey Santana!" she greeted, her face falling when Santana mimed slitting her throat.

"Quinn's sleeping. Keep it down," she hissed. Rachel nodded and grimaced playfully at her own antics. "Chill with the theatrics. I know you didn't mean it, Sasquatch, I'm taking her to my room."

Rachel stole a few glances at Santana turning off the tv and gently waking Quinn up with a few slow rubs on her back.

"Come on, sleepy head, lets go to my room," she cooed. Rachel smiled to herself and Santana caught her as she patted a now risen Quinn on the small of her back. "What, Berry?"

"Nothing," Rachel squeaked, shaking her head and disappearing off into her own room.

Quinn yawned and watched Rachel retreat, asking, "Was that Rachel?"

"Yeah, not minding her own business," Santana answered. Quinn chuckled, her voice raspy with sleep.

"Leave her alone, she means well," she ordered, albeit weakly and clipped by another yawn at reaching Santana's bed. She fell back onto it and knocked a few pillows onto the floor as she sank into the mattress.

Santana stretched out parallel to her and pulled her laptop onto her knees, preparing to entertain herself until her shift while Quinn dozed.

"You know what's strange about today?" Quinn baited.

"What?" replied Santana , not shifting her attention from her screen.

"We spent the whole day together and we didn't have sex," Quinn mused. This snagged Santana's attention, and she peered down at Quinn amongst the bedlinen.

Santana smirked, and mocked, "That's a first, usually you're trying to get into my pants within the hour." That got her a pillow to the face, at which she clutched her laptop protectively. "Watch the merchandise, Q! Not all of us have law salaries to throw around."

Quinn pouted, and grumbled, "I'm an intern, I don't get paid any salary. And  _you're_ the one always trying to get up  _my_ skirt."

Santana chuckled at the grumpy blonde in her bed, hair mussed with sleep and her once pressed blue shirt bunched up around her waist. She was impossibly sexy. Always. It was a goddamn mystery. Santana snapped her laptop shut, deposited it on her bedside table and cozied on up to Quinn on her cloud of pillows.

"Well, we can fix that. It only takes me 10 minutes max on you," she purred. Her fingers began to deftly pop the buttons on Quinn's oxford, a skill she has gotten quite good at with one hand.

Quinn quirked an eyebrow and flipped onto her side to mirror Santana. A warm smile took over her features and she lifted her hand towards Santana's face, tucking a few strands of hair behind her ear.

"No, there's nothing to fix, it was a great day. How about… top the day off," Quinn amended. Her buttery voice was barely audible and Santana realized that her touch had lingered down her jawline. Something in her stomach turned, no worse; fluttered. But she tried to shelved it.

She gulped back the sensation, reduced it to her being ticklish or just freaked out by Quinn staring at her that long, with that lazy smile that she gets and, god, that lip between her teeth.

Santana employed more physical means of attempting to suppress whatever was attempting to grow in her gut. She pulled Quinn's face towards her and kissed her deeply, filthily almost. She tried to inhale Quinn to override whatever was happening, to halt it in it's tracks, and spare Santana the impending heartbreak that romcoms and teen dramas warned her about over and over. Christ, she had even lived through this before. She wasn't going there again, not with Quinn. Quinn was a bitch, snooty and entitled and Santana barely tolerated her.

The girl on her mind pulled back for a moment to catch her breath.

"Well," she huffed, "I'm certainly awake now."

"Shut up," Santana breathed and she dove in again, tugging Quinn's clothes off of her. She couldn't look at her right now. It was just sex. Hot, fast, and a little bit rough, sex with some girl she happened to know from high school. The skin, slick and warm beneath her hands was the same skin of that cheek she slapped in the halls of McKinley. The vanilla mounds, pushing against their lace encasement as her chest arched towards Santana's mouth, could belong to any cheerleader from that locker room. Santana was guilty of sneaking a few peeks over the years, never one to waste an opportunity. And those whines and gasps stringing together the syllables of her name, as her fingers were completely consumed down to her knuckles, were the same slurred mumbles from that hotel room. The purred the same, spilling from Quinn's mouth into her ear.

This was way too much thought for her present disposal. She almost didn't notice how fast she was going, how quickly she was undoing the blonde writhing beneath her. She lifted her head from her right breast just in time to witness the eruption. Like everything else, Quinn still came the same, thighs clenching around Santana's wrist and stubby nails digging into her shoulder blades. Her breathing stalled and started in piercing bursts.

She's still Santana Lopez and Quinn is still Quinn and if things changed, she would've definitely noticed.

She slipped into sleep shortly after with the already drowsy Quinn. It was pressure on her arm that woke her up, the sky dark and an hour away from her alarm sounding she was going to be late for her shift.

Somewhere in the half-conscious realm of her mind, she put together that it was Quinn, naked Quinn, whose body weight was on her arm because Quinn was  _in_ her arms and they were fucking spooning. Naked.

And she woke up because Quinn woke up. Her body was moving against, but not exactly resisting, Santana's hold; that not so subtle wiggle to test if your bed buddy was also awake or not.

"San..?" she started, trying to turn around to lay face to face, but Santana couldn't deal with this, not now. She shushed her, mumbled that she was just cold, and pulled Quinn's furnace of a body into her chest.

"Okay," Quinn relented, and she shifted again, this time closer into the embrace. Santana's ears and neck burned at being so flush against her friend. Her nose nestled into Quinn's soft neck, thanks to her return to her short haircut. She could have sworn Quinn sucked in a little gasp at the contact, but at this point she could already be dreaming. Either way, she melted into Santana and wasn't awake much longer.

As she let sleep drag her under, Santana felt the faint tickle in her abdomen. It was barely there, nearly suffocated. A subtle change in the tide. A platelet shift just weak enough to avoid the richter scale. But she felt it, and it was unmistakable.

Shit.


End file.
